Orphism (pronounced awr-fiz-uhm)
(1) The religious or philosophical system of the Orphic
school, a religion of Ancient Greece, widespread from the sixth century BC
onwards, a blend of pre-Hellenic beliefs, the Thracian cult of Dionysius
Zagreus et al. The name was derived from
the movement supposedly being founded by the mythological prophet Orpheus.
(2) In fine art, a movement of the early twentieth
century most associated with French artist of the Parisian school Robert
Delaunay (1885–1941) although it was his wife Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) who
produced work in the greater volume. The
movement is also known as orphic cubism and while not pure abstraction, it
differed from Cubism in removing the need to maintain a representational
relationship with the subject, the works rather imaginings of a viewer’s
imagination.
Early 1800s: The construct was Orph(eus) (from the Greek
root Ὀρφεύς) + -ism.
The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the
French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient
Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing
done). It appeared in loanwords from
Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or
doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the
formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles,
doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism;
barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc). The term Orphism emerged
(with others) in the language of those classical scholars and historians who in
the early nineteenth century were categorizing and analyzing various aspects of
the less documented movements, religions and schools of thought from Antiquity,
especially the Greek, the Roman material having earlier been better studied. In the historic texts from Antiquity and
later, the myths, rituals, and writings attributed to Orpheus or the associated
the associated religious practices are discussed or described without the use a
single encompassing term.
Homage to Blériot (1914), oil on canvas by Robert Delaunay.
The use to describe the fork of cubism (a description
which offends some) was in 1912 co-opted (as orphisme) by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) (who five
years later would also coin “surrealism”), the construct being Orpheus + -ism. The adjective Orphic (of or related to Orpheus or the
doctrines attributed to him) dates from the 1670s, from a Latinized form of the
Greek orphikos (pertaining to Orpheus). The earlier adjective was Orphean, in use at
least by the 1590s. Orphism & orphist
are nouns, orphic is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is orphics. When used of the religion or the art movement
as a proper noun, an initial capital should be used (although the practice seem
to be to use lower case in the case of the latter).
Singer Flamenco (1916), oil on canvas by Sonia Delaunay.
In Greek mythology, Orpheus was the son of Oeager and his
mother was usually asid to be the Muse Calliope although in some tales it was
Polhymnia or Menippe, daughter of Thamyris.
This was how things were in the days before copyright. What is a constant in the myths is that
Orpheus was of Thracian origin and lived in a region bordering Olympus. The most famous tale of Orpheus is of his
love for his wife, the nymph Eurydice, struck dead when she stepped on the
serpent which bit her. Heartbroken,
Orpheus descended to the underworld to beg the gods to restore her to life. Playing the lyre (for which he was credited
with adding two strings to match the nine Muses), he so charmed the monsters of
Hades they agreed to restore her to Earth but imposed one condition: Orpheus
must walk back to the light with Eurydice following and must not look back
until they had left the underworld. The
pair had almost reached to gates to Earth when a terrible doubt struck Orpheus and
he had to turn to make sure Eurydice was there.
As soon as she fell into his glance, she died. Orpheus tried to return to again rescue her
but his entry was barred. Inconsolable,
he lived again in the human world but was killed by the women of Thrace who
resented his fidelity to Eurydice, her precious memory more to him than the
flesh & blood of their earthly charms.
The alternative history is darker.
Whatever happened in the underworld, after returning, Orpheus invented
pederasty and his lover was Calais, the son of Boreas. According to this tale, young men would meet
at Orpheus’s house, leaving their weapons outside where they were taken by
women angered at being neglected; together they took their revenge by killing
an decapitating Orpheus, his head and lyre cast into the ocean. They drifted to the shores of Lesbos where
the women accorded the remains funerary honors, accounting for why the island
produces so many fine lyric poets.
Lindsay Lohan imagined with an orphic influence.
Despite this perhaps unpromising history, it was Orpheus
who lent his name to the religious movement and school of philosophy. So many of the details are lost to history
that often it’s described as a “mysterious cult” but it was long-lasting and is
regarded as the last truly Greek religion although modern scholars don’t doubt
the foreign influences in its origin. It
was the tales of Orpheus using music to seduce the gods of the underworld that
the critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire recalled when in 19123 he first came upon
Robert Delaunay’s canvases of swirling, colorful shapes, recalling in technique
the works of the cubists yet unlike them, in mostly non-representational form. The Orphists of Antiquity had believed it had
been the art of music which had opened up one otherwise-inaccessible underworld
and Apollinaire co-opted the name to describe the process (that does seem to be
drawing a long bow) by which modern artists were borrowed elements from music
and science to inject powerful sensation into painting. One can argue with aspects of that but doubtlessly
there was a contribution to the evolution of abstract art.
Orphic art is distinctive even now and must at the time
have been striking, characterized by shapes rendered in color, often in spheres
and other geometric forms, curves especially prominent. Compositionally, the technique was to
assemble these shapes in a way to encourage a viewer to sense a vibrating,
lyrical harmony and Apollinaire regarded the pieces as essentially musical
although he claimed their power was such they transcended any single art form. The critic in him was also a structuralist who
anticipated later writing by stating Orphism “pure art” that had no need for
any semblance of identifiable imagery; it was instead, “the pictorializing of
light.” Those last pre-war years were
certainly a time of ferment in art and for more than a decade the cubists had
been re-imagining and re-packaging space and perception. Orphism might not be a fork of Cubism but the
influence seem undeniable, the schools sharing the same interest in breaking
down solid objects and challenging the traditional conceptions of space, volume,
angle and even time. What was most novel
about orphism was the intrusion of those vivid, colors which could jar or
sooth: color as a language of lyricism.
Rythme-couleur 1076 (1939), oil on canvas by Sonia Delaunay.
Delaunay genuinely was interested in the actual process
of vision. While the point of Cubism was what people saw and what they thought
about it, he focused on how the eye sees and what the brain does with the information
to turn it into movement or music; his interest was the optical structure of
vision and he never forgot the eye was an out-growth of the brain. After all, once imagery is deconstructed,
there is only color and light passing to the brain through the retina and from
this information comes the instinctive or learned constructs of shape, texture,
depth & time; something four dimensional from a two dimensional
object. That can of course be a quality of
any painting but what Orphism attempted to do was add the fifth dimension of
lyricism. Sonia Delaunay outlived her
husband by many decades and lived to see the influences of orphism incorporated
into the orthodoxy of design, fashion and commercial art of all types, fields
in which she would practice almost to her last days. In that sense it was a success although that
very absorption led some of the sterner (and usually more conservative) critics
to claim it was a cul-de-sac, melting away to invisibility whereas movements
like Cubism, Surrealism and even pop-art left motifs which endure to this
day. That seems a harsh and particularly
reductive reductionism but it is possible to write a convincing history of
twentieth century art without mentioning Orphism, whereas to ignore other movements which in their time created the same sort of stir would leave obvious gaps. Perhaps it was a victim of the forces of its
era and like vorticism, after World War I (1914-1918), it wasn’t what people
wanted to see.
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