Orphism

French Orphisme, trend in Cubist painting that gave priority to colour. The movement was named in 1912 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, whose use of the word Orphic recalls both the Symbolist painters' use of the term Orphic art in reference to Paul Gauguin's orchestration of colour and the poetry of Orpheus, the legendary poet and singer. Among the painters working in this style, Apollinaire noted Robert Delaunay (q.v.), Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. In the attempt to approximate music, Delaunay and hiswife, Sonia, led the way in transforming the visual into abstract colour harmonies.

One of the resources Delaunay used to arrive at away of integrating colour and Cubism was a book on simultaneous contrasts (De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, 1839), by the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. Unlike the Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, who had employed these theories during the 1880s, Delaunay was interested in applying them in an abstract way, exploring the effects of colour and light when they are not bound to an object. In his abstract work “Simultaneous Composition: Sun Disks” (1912–13; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), superimposed circles of colour have their own rhythm and movement.

Another painter associated with Orphism was František Kupka, a Czech who lived in Paris. Possibly Kupka was aware of Delaunay's disk paintings when he painted his “Disks of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colors)” in 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). As the musical analogy implicit in the title suggests, the vibrating colour orchestrations on the canvas seem to create visual music.

It was Delaunay's canvases, however, that deeply impressed August Macke, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee, who visited his Paris studio in 1912; this exposure had a decisive influence on their subsequent work. Orphism also exerted an influence on the development of German Cubism.

Futurism

Italian Futurismo, Russian Futurizm, early 20th-century artistic movement that centred in Italy and emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, andrestlessness of modern life in general. The most significant results of the movement were in the visual arts and poetry.

Futurism was first announced on Feb. 20, 1909, when the Paris newspaper Le Figaro published a manifesto by the Italian poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (q.v.). The name Futurism, coined by Marinetti, reflected his emphasis on discarding what he conceived to be the static and irrelevant art of the past and celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society. Marinetti's manifesto glorified the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed, power, and movement. He exalted violence and conflict and called for the sweeping repudiation of traditional cultural, social, and political values and the destruction of such cultural institutions as museums and libraries. The manifesto's rhetoric was passionately bombastic; its tone was aggressive and inflammatory and was purposely intended to inspire public anger and amazement, to arouse controversy, and to attract widespread attention.

Painting and sculpture

With the support of Marinetti, the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini published several manifestos on painting in 1910. Like Marinetti, they glorified originality for its own sake and despised inherited traditions of art. Although they were not as yet working in what was to become the Futurist style, they began to emphasize an emotional involvement in the dynamics of modern life, and toward this end they called for rendering the perception of movement and communicating to the viewer the sensations of speed and change. To achieve this, the Futurist painters adopted the Cubist technique of depicting several sides and views of an object simultaneously by means of fragmentedand interpenetrating plane surfaces and outlines. But the Futurists additionally sought to portray the object's movement in space, and they tried to achieve this goal by rhythmic spatial repetitions of the object's outlines during its transit, producing an effect akin rchitect Le Corbusier is reflected in the shapes of the houses he designed during the 1920s.