Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.You think our world is changing fast? Imagine the near-traumatic excitement of living in Paris a hundred or so years ago, when the city was hurtling out of the 19th century. Motor cars careened, billboards shouted, electric marquees glared, aeroplanes shot through the sky and the first Morse code radio signals bleeped from the Eiffel Tower. Urban life was sensual overload, and not even the first world war could quite extinguish the glitter.“The beautiful is everywhere,” wrote Fernand Léger in the 1920s. “Perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans on the white walls of your kitchen than in your 18th-century living rooms or in the official museums.”Painters harnessed cutting-edge chaos to their antique medium, issuing handmade paeans to industrial modernity, packaging volatility for the parlours of the well-to-do. And every few years, another group of artists reinvented perception. Cubists sliced physical existence into facets, Futurists idolised speed, and Orphists, the subject of the Guggenheim Museum’s Harmony and Dissonance show in New York, bundled the age’s breathless dazzlement and musical jangle into kaleidoscopic canvases.The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term Orphism in 1912 to describe a group of painters revolving around Robert and Sonia Delaunay, whose canvases spilled into poetic abstraction and vibrated with rainbow hues. Instead of isolating moments or framing specific scenes, they evoked pileups of simultaneous experience, aiming to paint everything everywhere all at once. Although in practice they stuck pretty close to the banks of the Seine.The problem with this aesthetic of cramming is that it yields an overabundance of abundance. After a while, the exhibition grows relentless in its embrace of wonder. Since the Orphists’ expressive tools were more limited than the reality they aspired to explode, the show winds up feeling repetitive.The star here is Robert Delaunay, who stared at the Eiffel Tower long enough to experience apocalyptic apparitions: “Light deforms everything, breaks everything; no more geometry, Europe crumbles. Breath of madness . . . Planetary waves.” Between 1909 and 1912, Delaunay wrestled these visions into paint. Vertical propulsion draws the eye skyward as buildings hunker and implode. In “The Red Tower,” where the iron skyscraper looks like a reflection in a shattered mirror, the future collides with the past. Paris’s symbol of technological prowess is also Delaunay’s equivalent to Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire: the looming, inescapable presence that he returned to with obsessive regularity, disassembling, refashioning and venerating.In the “Windows” series (1912-14), Delaunay recast the visible world as shimmering emanations of his own mind. The Eiffel Tower is still there, though, emerging as a long green cone amid a field of translucent colours. That process of deconstructing reality — observing some fragment so closely that it eventually bleeds into abstraction — transcended style. Monet never moved into the Orphists’ sphere, but he did spend those years scrutinising the lily pond in his garden until it dissolved into zones of pure paint.Orphism was a family business. Robert’s wife Sonia Delaunay, who recently headlined a stellar New York exhibition of her own, also features prominently in the Guggenheim show. She got down the frenetic pace and clashing stimuli of urban life with even more intensity and sweep than her husband. In the long, frieze-like “Bal Bullier” (1913), she memorialises the famous ballroom’s electric atmosphere in a polychrome parade of shapes. One of those flowing forms might even be her, wearing a bright crazy-quilt dress of her own design — a patchwork portrait hidden inside a patchwork panorama.Despite being connoisseurs of bedlam, the Orphists detected a whirling kind of order in the universe, which they translated into concentrically striped circles. Robert Delaunay’s “First Disc” (1913) looks startlingly like one of the targets that captivated Jasper Johns more than 40 years later. In Sonia Delaunay’s “Electric Prisms” (1914), overlapping wheels spin across the canvas, shooting off rays of colour. František Kupka (another of the original Orphists, along with Francis Picabia) used a compass so assiduously that he seemed constantly to be painting heavenly bodies and intersecting rainbows — or maybe poker chips scattered across a card table. Apollinaire categorised the movement as an offshoot of Cubism; he might just as well have called it Spherism.Most of these painters — including Americans abroad such as Morgan Russell and a very young Thomas Hart Benton — used colour in place of illusionism to create a sense of depth. The odd man out here is Marc Chagall, who maintained an old-fashioned allegiance to receding space and an identifiable point of view. His “La Grande Roue” (1911-12) is not just a study in roundness, but a view of the Ferris wheel that was a main attraction at the Universal Exposition of 1900. “Paris through the Window” doesn’t really require a title at all: the fractured sunbeams, two-faced heads, levitating figures and jumbled buildings can’t disguise what a filmmaker might call an establishing shot — a melancholy cat gazes on the familiar low skyline, impaled by that one ubiquitous tower. You can practically sniff the aroma of croissants drifting up from the boulangerie below.Chagall interjects the occasional pinch of sadness, even despair, into a style dominated by the Delaunays’ undiluted ebullience. “Homage to Apollinaire” (1913) hints that tossing out too many conventions comes at a cost. Adam and Eve are fused at the centre of an enormous clock face, their faces frozen in the same masks of regret that Eve wears in Masaccio’s 15th-century “Expulsion”. They share a pair of legs, but their separate torsos turn to mark the passage of hours and minutes. Chagall may have had doubts about Apollinaire’s notion of manic simultaneity. This painting reads as an argument: no matter how you disguise the fact with formal experiments and aesthetic theories, time keeps ticking by, one second after another, dragging us in a single, inexorable direction.To March 9, guggenheim.org
