France, ca. 1912

In 1912 the poet Guillaume Apollinaire applied the French term Orphisme to the visionary and lyrical paintings of Robert Delaunay, relating them to Orpheus, a poet and musician in Greek mythology. It also applies to the paintings of Sonia Terk Delaunay and is often mentioned in connection with Frantisek Kupka and a group of then-contemporary American and Canadian artists, called Synchromists, who painted according to a system of “color harmonies” that equated hues to musical pitches. The term Orphic Cubism [more] is sometimes used instead of Orphism because of Robert Delaunay’s roots in a Cubist style. Departing from the limited palette of Georges Braque’s and Pablo Picasso’s initial phase of Cubism, the Delaunays’ paintings are full of brightly colored circular forms, the color combinations of which are based on the “law of simultaneous contrast of colors,” developed in the 19th century by French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul; Chevreul’s theories had already influenced painters such as Eugène Delacroix and Georges Seurat.

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