Orphism, in the visual arts, a trend in abstract art spearheaded by Robert Delaunay that derived from Cubism and gave priority to light and colour. The movement’s name was coined in 1912 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Apollinaire regarded the colourful Cubist-inspired paintings of Delaunay as initiating a new style that brought musical qualities to painting. He named this style Orphism in reference to Orpheus, the legendary poet and singer of ancient Greek mythology, who was a popular symbol of the ideal, mystically inspired artist. Other painters working in this style included Robert’s wife Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Jean Metzinger, and Marcel Duchamp.

The correlation between colour and music was an idea that interested many artists at the time. Symbolist artists and writers saw analogies between musical tones and visual hues. The painter Wassily Kandinsky had begun to associate music with the abstract aspects of his art, and he discussed the connections in his book Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912; Concerning the Spiritual in Art).

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Orphist painters were interested in the geometric fragmentation of Cubism, but—unlike the Cubists, who removed almost all colour from their paintings, and rather like the Fauvists—they considered colour to be a powerful aesthetic element. One of the resources that inspired Robert Delaunay and Orphist experiments with integrating colour and Cubism was De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839; The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and Their Applications to the Arts) by the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. The Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat had employed those theories in figurative and landscape compositions during the 1880s, but the Orphist style applied them in an abstract way, exploring the effects of colour and light when they are not bound to an object. In his painting Simultaneous Composition: Sun Disks (1912–13), for example, Robert Delaunay painted superimposed circles of colour that have a sense of rhythm and movement that can be considered analogous to music harmony.

Kupka, a Czech who lived in Paris, was a strong proponent of Orphism. In 1912 he exhibited his abstract painting Disks of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colours) (1912). Kupka’s vibrating colour orchestrations on the canvas were intended to unite visual and musical ideas. His title refers both to music and to 17th-century physicist Sir Isaac Newton, who first understood the relationship of light to colour and the formation of a rainbow.

Orphist works were first exhibited at the Salon des Independants in 1913, but it was at the 1914 Salon that Orphism took centre stage. At that Salon Sonia Delaunay exhibited Prismes Électriques (1914), an abstract painting that exemplified Orphism with its blend of Cubist geometry, Fauvist bold colour, and Futurist expression of movement.

The Orphist canvases of the Delaunays and Kupka deeply impressed the artists August Macke, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee, who visited the Delaunays’ Paris studio in 1912; that exposure had a decisive influence on their subsequent work. Orphism also influenced the development of Cubism in Germany.

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