ART HISTORY ARTICLE SUMMARY

http://www.jstor.org

Orphism and Color Theory Author(s): Herschel B. Chipp Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 40, No. 1, (Mar., 1958), pp. 55-63 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3047747 Accessed: 24/04/2008 21:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

ORPHISM AND COLOR THEORY*

HERSCHEL B. CHIPP

I

IN accounts of the development of nonfigurative painting, the brief movement known as Orphism has generally been considered merely an offshoot of Analytical Cubism. Generally, historians have studied more prominent movements for evidence of the abandonment of the

physical object; for the moment at which colors and forms for their own sake are substituted for abstraction from nature. The evolutionat of Picasso's work through the "analytic" period of Cubism has been followed step by step and month by month, from the first fragmentation of the human figure in the Demoiselles dAvignon to its reconstitution in terms of geometric forms as in collage and later Cubism. Cubism was basically materialistic in that the shapes employed were derived from natural objects and existed in a space that, while drastically restricted and distorted, nevertheless still referred to the space of the physical world.

A second important channel leading to the ideal of a nonfigurative painting, contemporary with the early Cubist period of Picasso and Braque, is the work of Wassily Kandinsky. The Russian, reaching his artistic maturity in Munich under the stimulus of the Expressionist move- ments then current in Germany, developed a nonfigurative vocabulary of colors and lines that, while rejecting the appearances of nature, still evoked the dynamism of visual experiences of it. Kandinsky's approach is distinct from the Cubist's abstraction of the forms of physical objects; his paintings objectify the interior world of the feelings by means of forms and colors that corre- spond with emotional states.

The painters who were called Orphists were indebted to the analytical period of Cubism for the concept of the fragmentation of objects, but their absorption with the optical characteristics of colors led the most daring of them eventually to reject objects altogether and produce an art based upon the dynamic contrasts of colors. This attitude represents a third course toward non- figurative painting.

The word Orphism was invented by the poet and critic, Guillaume Apollinaire, and was appar- ently first applied in October 1912 to the colorful paintings of Franois Kupka.' Kupka's concern with colors as abstract elements dates from before this time, however, for a painting of I9Io was entitled "Yellow Scale," and several others of 1911 and I9I2 "Planes by Colors."2 He is gen- erally credited with painting the first completely nonfigurative works in Paris, the Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors' and the Discs of Newton (Fig. 9), both of 1912, and both of them composed of interlocking circular shapes in brilliant colors. They were stimulated by his interest in Neo- impressionist theories of color contrast and by the direct influence of Analytical Cubism. Prior to this time his work was mainly composed of vigorous decorative patterns similar to those employed in the Art Nouveau poster style.4 After 1912 he continued with nonfigurative painting in two major modes; one composed of vertically arranged geometric planes of flat color, and the other

* This paper was first presented at the meeting of the Col- 2. Titles are translated from those given in the catalogues lege Art Association in Detroit, January I957. of the salons. Sometimes they vary slightly as given by differ-

i. One author states that this occurred at a lecture given by ent authors. Apollinaire at the Section d'or exhibition (October 10-30, 3. Exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, 1912. Reproduced in I9I2); Emmanuel Siblik, Francois Kupka, Prague, Aventium, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, New York, 1929, p. 13. Another states that Kupka's entries in the Salon Museum of Modern Art, 1936, fig. 61, under the title Fugue d'Automne (October i-November 8) inspired the word; L. A. in Red and Blue. Gremilly, Frank Kupka, Paris, Povolozky, n.d. (ca. 19a1), 4. See illustrations for Lysistrata (1907) and Promtheus p. 14. (I909) reproduced in Siblik, op.cit.

THE ART BULLETIN

of dynamic curvilinear or irregular shapes sometimes reminiscent of his earlier style.5 Kupka em- ployed brilliant colors, but his compositions were based upon line and pattern more than upon color contrasts, and he eventually rejected the title of Orphism altogether. His early statements on his art deal mainly with concepts of nonfigurative painting and its analogies with music, rather than with color problems.6

Francis Picabia was placed with the Orphists by Apollinaire in his book of I9I3,7 and again in 1914 when reproductions of six of his paintings were featured to accompany the poet's review of the Salon des Independants.8 His colorful quasi-figurative work, Dance at the Spring of 1912,' is heavily dependent upon early Cubist simplification, but lacks the Cubist fragmentation of objects into a dense matrix of forms. Even in these Cubist-inspired works is a latent Dadaism that was soon to emerge in a quite different style. Picabia's theories, also, deal mainly with the aesthetics of nonfigurative art and its similarity to music, and not with color.l0

Robert Delaunay is the artist most closely identified with Orphism. For the brief period from about I912 to I914, he aspired toward a nonfigurative painting based upon the optical charac- teristics of brilliant, prismatic colors so dynamic that they would function as the form. His theories are almost entirely concerned with color and light.'l He exerted considerable influence upon several of his contemporaries including the Americans, S. Macdonald Wright, Morgan Russell, and Patrick Bruce, and the Blaue Reiter group, August Macke, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and also upon Lyonel Feininger. Apollinaire became a close friend of Delaunay during I9I2, and is chiefly responsible for publicizing Orphism. The poet had praised the Ville de Paris shown at the Salon des Independants of I9I212 as an example of color creating structure and, when he revised the page proofs of his book on Cubism in the fall of that year, included Orphic Cubism as one of his four categories. He named Delaunay as a contributor to the new movement and mentioned Leger, Picabia, and Duchamp as participants.'3 Apollinaire was strongly influenced by Delaunay's theories of. color and quoted from them in his own explanations of the new movement. The implications of a "pure" painting that they contained appealed to the poet, who for many years had been in the circle of the Symbolist poets where the rejection of the physical world was a constant theme."1 At the time of the Independants in March I914, Andre Salmon wrote that there was a school of Delaunay.'5 Apollinaire had commenced a book on Orphism during the time that he had lived with Delaunay prior to their trip to Berlin in December 1912.16 The first Herbstsalon in Berlin in 1913 featured a salon of Orphism with the paintings of Delaunay and the decorative art objects of his wife, Sonia Delaunay, based on the same color principles.7

II

Delaunay's obsession with color as the sole expressive and structural means was sustained by

5. See reproductions in Barr, op.cit., fig. 62, and Gremilly, op.cit., passim.

6. See his statement in the New York Times, October 19, I913.

7. Les peintres cubistes, Paris, Figuiere, 1913, p. 25. 8. Les soirees de Paris, March 15, 1914. 9. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Reproduced in color in

The Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1954, I, no. i58.

o. See his essay "Cubism by a Cubist," in Views on the International Exhibition Held in New York and Chicago (pamphlet), New York, Association of American Painters and Sculptors, Inc., 1913, pp. 45-48.

i i. As revealed in his notes entitled Sur la lumi're (ms. in possession of Mme. Sonia Delaunay, Paris), translated by Paul Klee as "Ober das Licht," Der Sturm, nos. 144-145, January 1913. A facsimile of the manuscript in French and Klee's translation are printed in Ausstellung Robert Delaunay (cata- logue), Berne, Kunsthalle, 195I.

iz. L'intransigeant, March 2o, I9I2. I3. Apollinaire, op.cit., p. 25. The poet often seemed to

base his judgment of pictures upon appearances rather than conceptions, for he cited Picasso's light as an example of Orphism, and he included almost every important painter under some category of Cubism, even Matisse and Laurencin. His writings on Orphism, however, are much more consistent than those on Cubism.

14. See the first part of his book, which is mainly a pastiche of articles written between 1905 and 913.

I5. Montjoie!, March 1914. 16. See letter from Delaunay, Art: Documents, Geneva,

January 1951, p. 3. An article by the poet, entitled "Realite- peinture pure," that was given as a lecture at the Delaunay exhibition in Berlin, consisted mainly of quotations from the artist (Les soirees de Paris, December 1912, pp. 348-349).

17. See review in Les soirees de Paris, November I5, 1913, pp. 2-5.

56

I. Robert Delaunay, Night Scene (Le Fiacre), I906-I907. Paris, Collection Louis Carre (photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

2. RKooert LJelaunay, windovw on the Ctty, NIo. 4, I 9 I - 19 New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

3. <obert lelaunay, tLiffe ower, i910. Basel, Kunstmuseum

4. Robert Delaunay, Ville de Paris, 1912. Paris, Musee National d'Art Moderne (photo: Marc Vaux)

5. August MvacKe, iathing Ci3rls, 1 93. Munich Bayerische Staatsgemildesammlungen

7. Robert Delaunay, Discs, 1913 New York, Museum of Modern Art

6. Franz Marc, Mountains, I912 San Francisco Museum of Art

8. Paul Klee, City of Towers, I9I6 Philadelphia, Museum of Art

io. Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Windows, 1912 Paris, Collection Louis Carre

9. Francois Kupka, Discs of Newoton, 1912 Philadelphia, Museum of Art

ORPHISM AND COLOR THEORY

his study of color theory. Most important for him was a study of the experiments in color per- ception conducted by Eugene Chevreul, chemist and director of the dyeing processes at the Gobelins tapestry works, first published in i839.18 Chevreul made no great contributions to the science of color, but his empirically determined, practical theories of color contrast and harmony were

widely read by artists. He sought to systematize the use of colors by constructing a color wheel composed of a physicist's spectrum arranged in a circular form, just as Newton had done more than a century before.1 He divided the wheel into 72 equal parts making each part a uniform color instead of retaining the normal gradations of the spectrum, and he constructed a series of similar wheels adding different proportions of black to each of them. Thus he had a complete vocabulary of colors of fixed hue and value. Of most importance to artists were his practical experiments that proved what they knew intuitively-that when complementary colors are juxta- posed, each appears to be more intense than when seen in isolation. He also showed that if there is a perceptible difference in dark-light value between the two colors, then the darker will appear to be even darker and the lighter more light. Further, he made extensive tables of his experiments and observations showing that all colors present in the field of vision at the same time mutually modify one another in specific ways and to a predetermined extent. These phenomena were not

merely vagaries of the human eye, but were based upon laws that were scientifically demonstrable, and were, furthermore, predictable.20

Paul Signac's theories of Neoimpressionism, first published in 1899, were highly influential on later artists.21 Signac was convinced by his own study of Chevreul and other theoreticians that the eleriient of color in painting could be controlled by the mind, and could be employed to

It was in an attempt to control the chaotic multiplicity of colors and the uncontrolled sensations of Impressionism that he proposed the four principles of Divisionism. These provide that the various aspects of color in a painting, that is, color of the object, of the light, and of the reflections, should be analyzed separately,22 and that they may be brought into equilibrium according to the laws of contrast as set forth by Chevreul and other scientists. Thus, color was considered apart from a descriptive function and was thought of as thought of as an independent expressive means. Finally, Signac would subordinate the role role of color, traditionally conceived of as the more emotional element, to the linear composition, or the more intellectual element. Thus color was to be brought under conscious control as one of the elements of the painting. In terms of Signac's immediate aims the transitory and sensuous aspects of Impressionism were systematized; as he expressed it "the hand is of no importance, only the mind and the eye."28

In his conviction that color could be scientifically controlled, Signac was dependent chiefly upon Charles Henry, director of the Laboratory of the Physiology of Sensations at the Sorbonne. Henry was well known to the artists, having discussed his theories with Signac, Seurat, and others, and Signac had made diagrams to illustrate the theories in his books. He had written extensively on the theories of art and music, on mathematics, and on techniques of painting, and was himself a poet in the circle of the Symbolists. His major works dealt with the physiology of aesthetic

i8. Michel Eugene Chevreul, Dc la loi du contraste simul- by the Symbolist journal, La revwue blanche, 1899). tane des couleurs, Paris, Pitois-Levrault, 1839. Chevreul's prac- 22. Ibid., pp. 13-14. According to an observer, Seurat ac- tical approach and readable accounts made his books easily tually proceeded by these stages; first laying in the local understandable to artists. Signac had visited him and Delacroix color, then "achromatizing" it with the color of the light had hoped to, although it is not believed that he had actually falling on the surface, then adding the color of the reflections done so. from neighboring objects, and finally including the comple-

19. A later work is made up of plates of his color wheels: mentaries of these colors. See Felix Feneon's article reprinted Des couleurs et de leurs applications aux arts industriels, Paris, by John Rewald in "Seurat: the Meaning of the Dots," Art Bailliere, 1864. News, XLVIII, April 1949, p. 27.

20. Chevreul, De la loi du contraste.. ., ch. I and passim. 23. Paul Signac, "Les besoins individuels et la peinture," 21. Paul Signac, D'Eugne Delacroix au neo-impressionisme, Encyclopidie francaise, xvi, x935, p. 16.84-8.

4th ed., Paris, Floury, 1939, ch. I and passim (first published

57

THE ART BULLETIN

sensations, and they analyzed experiments by which he attempted to reduce the effects of color and line to simple nervous reactions. Red is the most dynamic color, he states, and therefore corre-

sponds to an upward direction, while its complementary blue-green is the most inhibiting color and therefore is downward in its movement.24 Henry's study of the physiological effects of colors

appealed to Signac and to Seurat since it reduced colors to measurable quantities, in contrast to the symbolic or metaphysical meanings attributed to them by the romantic and symbolist poets.

The possibility of a rational control of color in painting had already been stated by the theore- tician Charles Blanc in his artists' handbook of 1867, which was well known to Signac.25 Blanc stated that color is feminine because it is emotional, mobile, and intangible; but that drawing is masculine for it is precise, fixed, and constant. This duality may be solved by giving order to color. Color may be made to conform to fixed rules just as music, and it can be taught in the same way. In a painting color must be made subservient to form, and thus it is identified not with irrationality, vagueness, and emotionality, but rather with rationality, clarity, and order.

The theories of Chevreul and Blanc were the foundation for the articles of David Sutter that were so influential on the young Georges Seurat. Sutter somewhat dogmatically proclaimed the supremacy of the mind over the emotions in art, and he sought for laws that would govern the harmony of colors just as he believed that there were laws governing musical harmony.26

The views of these theoreticians, conditioned partly by observation and partly by scientific experiment, were given the sanction of modern science in 1879 by the textbook of an American physicist, Ogden Rood.27 This book was carefully studied by Signac and other later artists. Basing his work upon the studies of Helmholtz in the sensations and perceptions of vision, Rood dealt with colors solely as visual phenomena, and hence, like Henry, freed them from the symbolic and metaphysical associations with which they had been endowed by earlier artists and theoreticians. He proved by controlled experiments that the brilliance and transparency of colors in nature could be simulated by placing on a surface adjacent dots of different colors, so that at the proper distance from the eye they would produce a lively flicker and glimmer. His experiments dealt with colored light, not with the pigments of Chevreul, and they showed that mixtures of colored light tend toward white while mixtures of pigment tend toward black; a discovery of the greatest importance to artists seeking greater brilliance and purity in their color. His familiarity with the actual practice and problems of painting gave the artists confidence in his work, and his careful laboratory ex- periments lent the prestige of science to the general theory of the optical mixture of colors.

III

Delaunay's own writings on color, although influenced by scientists and theoreticians, are intui- tive and sometimes random statements based upon the belief that color is a thing in itself with its own powers of both expression and form.28 Painting is a purely visual art, he writes, without

24. Charles Henry, Le cercle chromatique, Paris, Verdin, Paris, Bailliere, 188I); see especially ch. xvi. Rood's book I888, pp. 62-67. See Seurat's cover design for a theater pro- was written in clear, nontechnical language, comprehensible to gram made according to Henry's theories, reproduced in John the artists. He was himself a painter, had discussed his theories Rewald, Post-Impressionism, From Van Gogh to Gauguin, with other artists, and had studied John Ruskin's writings. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1956, p. I39. This book Helmholtz's works (posthumously collected in Hermann von contains much valuable material on the theories and criticism Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, Hamburg of Neoimpressionism, some of it translated for the first time. and Leipzig, L. Voss, x896) expressed the physiologist's view

25. Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin, Paris, of color theory in contrast to the physical views of Newton, Renouard, 1867. For the following theories, see p. 595 and yet they still were highly technical, dealing with relations passim. between the wave lengths of colors from the spectrum and

26. David Sutter, "Les phenomenes de la vision," L'Art, I, optical sensations. They were, therefore, beyond the under- I88o (series of six articles, paissim): "The laws of the aesthetic standing of almost all the artists. harmony of colors can be taught as the rules of musical har- 28. Excerpts from his notes are included and discussed in mony are taught" (p. 219). FranSois Gilles de la Tourette, Robert Delaunay, Paris, Mas-

27. Ogden N. Rood, Modern Chromatics, New York, Ap- sin, x950, passim; Denys Sutton, "Robert Delaunay," Maga- pleton, 1879 (translated as Thiorie scitntifiqu des couleurs, ine of Art, XLI, October 1948, pp. 208-211; LUon Degand,

58

ORPHISM AND COLOR THEORY

dependence upon intellectual elements, and the act of perception is in the impact of colored light upon the eye. The contrasts and harmonies of color produce within the eye simultaneous move- ments that correspond to movements in nature. This phenomenon of vision is the "subject" of painting."

His early painting, like his theory, is deeply rooted in Neoimpressionism. In Night Scene (Le Fiacre) of 1906-1907 (Fig. I) the vigorous activity of the lively brushstrokes in brilliant, spectral colors glowing against the dark ground is an intensification of Signac's vitalistic touch. Signac had insisted that the entire canvas be enlivened with touches of color; flat colors appear weak and smothered, he writes, while the divisionist touch and the optical mixture of colors give the surface the movement and vitality of life.0 Night Scene represents a step closer to abstraction than Signac's work, since the brushstrokes do not conform so closely to the contours of objects but often seem to float on the surface without a descriptive function. They do not define solid objects, but the areas

surrounding them, thus dematerializing the objects themselves into shadowy areas. These areas are merged into other adjacent areas, creating irregular and sometimes ambiguous shapes that are now substance and now shadow, a heritage of the fin-de-sicle taste for the organic unity of indefinite shapes, as in the compositions of Bonnard and Vuillard."'

Although the spectral colors of Neoimpressionism were momentarily abandoned in the next stage, the Eiffel Tower series, a new lesson was learned-the fragmentation of solid objects and their merging with space. Influenced by Cezanne, Analytical Cubism, and Futurism, Delaunay found in the Eiffel Tower, which Seurat also admired, a structure adequate to his own need for form, and at the same time one that in reality actually fragments space and light. In the Eiffel Tower of 1910 (Fig. 3),"32 this interpenetration of tangible objects and surrounding space is ac-

companied by an intense movement of the geometric planes that is more active than the static equilibrium of Cubist forms, and yet it conforms more to the pictorial structure of the picture than the somewhat cinematographic movements of Futurism. Delaunay writes that the unification of object and space is possible only after the homogeneity of the object as a solid physical entity has been destroyed, a step which was already anticipated by Cezanne and demonstrated in Analyti- cal Cubism. He continues: "The watercolors of Cezanne announce Cubism; the colored, luminous planes destroy the object. . . . To destroy the object means to destroy the expressive means which painters have employed since David. . . . After having broken the line, the line which has existed for a long time, one can no longer restore it or reassemble it.""8

In some of the Eiffel Tower series, he begins to employ color that is as dynamic as the form, in fragmented areas and strong contrasts of vermilion, orange, yellow, and green. With this series he begins to combine the coloristic tradition of Neoimpressionism with the formal structures of Cubism.

The unification accomplished between the fragmented physical objects and the space as attempted in the Eiffel Tower series is carried further in the dense matrix of forms in the later Window on the City of 1910-1911i (Fig. 2).84 Although based on architectural forms, it is more abstract than the Eiffel Tower series and most of Cubism of the same date. The uniform divisionist stroke re-

"Robert Delaunay," Art d'Auiourd'hui, October g1951, pp. 6- 1895, reproduced in John Rewald, Pierre Bonnard, New York, ii. For a study of color theory in modern painting, which Museum of Modern Art, 1948, p. 68. includes sections on Delaunay, Signac and Seurat, the Cubists, 32. See color reproduction in Maurice Raynal, Picasso to Kandinsky, Marc, and Klee, see Walter Hess, Das Problem Surrealism, Geneva, 1950, p. 71. der Farbe, Munich, Prestel, x953. A study of Delaunay's writ- 33. Translated from Delaunay's notebook, collection of ings is being prepared by Pierre Francastel: Robert Delaunay: Mme. Sonia Delaunay, Paris. Cited in part in Gilles de la Du cubisme a 'Part abstrait, S.E.V. P.E.N., Paris. Tourette, op.cit., pp. 36-38.

29. Sur la lumiere, loc.cit. (cf. note x above). 34. See color reproduction in Werner Haftmann, Malerci 30. Signac, D'Eugene Delacroix... , p. I6. im 2o Jahrhundert, Munich, Prestel, x955, plates, p. 188. 31. Cf. Bonnard's The Cab Horse, Bd. des Batignollcs, ca.

59

THE ART BULLETIN

appears in a more controlled and abstract manner, and the vivid contrasts of violet, blue, pink, and crimson partake more of the quality of light.

But here a major problem arose, Delaunay writes, in the conflict between color that should exist by and for itself, and the fragments of objects that refer to the physical world. His distinction is similar to Kandinsky's dualism between "concrete" art that includes only nonrepresentational colors and lines, and "objective" art, where colors and lines are tainted by their dependence upon natural objects.85 The existence of the reminiscence of nature in painting is not a problem for the Cubists, Delaunay continues, for Cubism is basically graphic or linear, and the fragments of real things that refer to the physical world can be assimilated. But when painting is motivated entirely by color, then these fragments of real things cannot exist along with it. He writes: "I set myself the problem of formal color."86

This problem is still unresolved in the Ville de Paris of 1912 (Fig. 4),87 where the figures and landscape elements retain their representational character even though broken up into a vibrant pattern of colored planes. Delaunay believed that a resolution was possible only when the color contrasts were felt to be sufficiently dynamic to sustain the picture when the objects had disappeared. Apollinaire explained this painting as: ". .. forms fractured by light create colored

planes. These colored planes are the structure of the painting and nature is no longer a subject to be described, but a pretext, a poetic evocation of expression by colored planes which order them- selves by simultaneous contrasts. Their colored orchestration creates an architecture which unrolls as phrases of color and ends in a new form of expression in painting, Pure Painting."88

In the several versions of Sim'ultaneous Windows of I9I2 (Fig. io),"8 there are still suggestions

is a grid of quasi-geometric forms that are almost completely nonfigurative. The color is even more brilliant than in the Window on the City series, and partakes of the quality of colored light. It was this series that inspired Apollinaire to write the poem Les fenetres where he extols the lyricism of color.

"La fenetre s'ouvre comme une orange, Le beau fruit de la lumiere."4'

It was also at this time that he included Orphic Cubism among his four categories in his book on the Cubist painters, and named Delaunay as a major contributor to it. He explained that it "is the art of painting new structures out of elements which have not been borrowed from the visual sphere, but have been created entirely by the artist himself, and have been endowed by him with a powerful reality.""4

In this series the objects so important for Cezanne and Cubism were almost completely purged, and with them were purged the characteristics of the physical world: tangibility, space, and light and dark. Light and dark values, which were retained from the phenomenal world by the Cubists, were abolished in favor of differences of hue. The vigorous simultaneous contrasts of these hues were to create within the picture proper a luminous colored light that permeated the painting.

During 1913 in the Discs series (Figher intensity and movement of the color contrasts convinced Delaunay that he had approached the ideal of a pure color, where color conveyed the

expression, so that the shapes of the objects of nature were no longer necessary. His intoxication

35. See Peter Selz, "The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily 39. See color reproduction of a similar work in this series, Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non- ibid., pL. I2. Objective Painting," ART BULLETIN, XXix, 1957, pp. 127- 40. Andre Billy, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paris, Pierre 136. Seghers, 1947, p. 128.

36. Notebook, loc.cit. (cf. note 33 above). 41. Les peintres cubistes, p. 25. 37. See color reproduction in Gilles de la Tourette, op.cit., 42. See color reproduction in A. H. Barr, Jr., ed., Masters

pi. I0. of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1954, 38. Quoted in ibid., p. 39. p. 77-

60

ORPHISM AND COLOR THEORY

with color is reflected in his statements. "In painting by pure colors it is the color itself and its contrasts that form the structure . . . and not the use of other devices such as geometry. Color is form and subject. It is the sole theme that develops, transforms itself, aside from all analysis, psychological or otherwise. Color is a function of itself; all its action is in force at every moment. ... I used the scientific word of Chevreul: 'the simultaneous contrast.'... I played with colors as one would express himself in music by a fugue of colored, varied phrases."48

IV

While the Orphists' concern with nonfigurative painting and their taste for brilliant color were

unique traits among the Cubists in I9I2, the artists of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich were

deeply concerned at this time with these very problems. By about I911 Wassily Kandinsky had

purged the visible aspects of nature from many of his paintings in favor of an "inner meaning," and in I912 he wrote that "the inner note of the organic form will be heard even though this

organic form has been pushed into the background."" In contrast to the more rational attitude of the French artists and theoreticians, Kandinsky, Paul

Klee, Franz Marc, and August Macke rejected scientific theories, considering colors in rather

specific psychological or metaphysical terms, as in the theories of Phillipp Otto Runge and Goethe."4 Kandinsky worked out a synesthesia where musical sounds, states of nature, emotions, and colors were all related in a manner similar to the theories of "correspondence" of the Symbolist poets. While he writes that colors are combined in a painting solely according to their "spiritual significance," yet he recognizes the optical effects of certain colors, such as the apparent tendency of cool colors to recede and contract and warm colors to advance and expand.'6

The Blaue Reiter artists were well acquainted with recent painting in Paris, all of them having lived and studied there prior to the formation of the group. When Delaunay's entries in the Salon des Independants of 91 stood out from the austere tonalities of the Cubists, Kandinsky invited him to show in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich in December of that year. Among his four entries were two of the View of the City series of 1911, similar to Window on the City

(Fig. 2). His work was greatly admired by the German artists; three of the paintings were sold and three were reproduced in the Blaue Reiter almanac.'7 He was visited in Paris in I9I12 by Klee,

Marc, and Macke at the time that he was developing his most brilliantly colorful work, the series of Windows and Discs, and their own interest in color was stimulated by his concept of simultaneous contrasts. An exhibition of his work was arranged by Herwath Walden at the Sturm gallery in Berlin late in 1912, and Delaunay and Apollinaire traveled there, visiting Macke in Bonn on the way. Apollinaire gave a lecture in the gallery, quoting mainly from Delaunay's theories

43. Notebook, cited in part in Gilles de la Tourette, op.cit., p. 37, and Sutton, op.cit.

44. Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (trans.), New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946, p. 5o. First published as Ober das Geistige in der Kunst, Munich, Piper, 1912. See another account of Kandinsky's transition to nonfigurative painting in Kenneth Lindsay, "The Genesis and Meaning of the Cover Design for the First 'Blaue Reiter' Exhibition Catalog," ART BULLETIN, XXXV, 1953, pp. 47-50.

45. Despite the mystical nature of his views of color that based the three primary colors on the symbolism of the Trinity and conceived of white as good and black as evil, Runge de- veloped first the idea of the complete color sphere, with white at the top, black at the bottom and pure hues about the middle. In his system every color had a specific place and no color could exist in more than one place. In this respect he was ahead of the scientists, for even Chevreul did not conceive of a complete color system. (J. B. C. Grundy, Tiecke und Runge, Strasbourg, 1930, and Wilhelm Ostwald, Colour Science

[trans.], London, Winsor and Newton, 1931, I, p. i2). Goethe's theories are mainly an attempt to draw color theory

out of the realm of physics, where Newton's discoveries had placed it, and into physiology and psychology; from an ex- ternal physical to an internal psychological phenomenon (J. W. von Goethe, Farbenlehre, Jena, I928, and Ostwald, op.cit., pp. 15-I7). Adolph Hoelzel (1853-1934), to a greater extent than most other artists, consciously used colors according to a system of pairs of contrasts: dark-light, cold-warm, comple- mentaries, high and low intensities, quantities, color - no color, and simultaneous contrasts. (Adolph Hoelzel [catalogue], Stutt- garter Galerieverein, 1953.)

46. Kandinsky, op.cit., pp. 5 f., 60. 47. Reproduced: St. Severin (1909), Eiffel Tower (I9I0)

and View of the City (I9 I). An article, "Die Kompositions- mittel bei Robert Delaunay," praised his movement acquired by means of color. (Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, ed., Der Blaue Reiter, Munich, Piper, 1912.)

61

THE ART BULLETIN

of simultaneous contrasts and on light. The first Herbstsalon in Berlin in I913 featured a salon of Orphism with forty-five works by Robert and Sonia Delaunay.

Delaunay's brilliant color was for the Blaue Reiter artists a continuation in post-Cubist terms of the French coloristic tradition as in Impressionism, Neoimpressionism and Fauvism, all of which had been seen in major exhibitions in Germany and were greatly admired. His colorful and rhythmic versions of the constructive principles of Cubism were more easily assimilable for the German artists than the austere and monochromatic works of Picasso and Braque. Klee wrote in 1912 that he liked his work because he had avoided the Cubist absorption with construction and the materiality of objects.'8

Macke's painting had more in common with Delaunay's subject-matter, form, and color than it did with his fellow members of the Blaue Reiter. He was not a theorist, but through conversa- tions and correspondence came to agree with Delaunay's concept of the simultaneous contrast of prismatic colors. Shortly after the beginning of their close friendship he began to achieve in his paint the purity of colored light, and he divided the picture up into colored planes that vibrated simultaneously over the surface, as in the Bathing Girls of 1913 (Fig. 5).49

Although Marc had developed his own system of complementary colors, his views on color were not scientific but were Expressionist associations of colors with sounds and metaphysical states of nature similar to those of Kandinsky.50 He had worked with Neo-impressionist color and brush- stroke before he had developed his familiar style of rhythmically arranged animal figures. The influence of the Cubists and Delaunay, as well as the Futurists, after his visit to Paris in 1912 was very strong. Beginning with this year his graceful curvilinear forms were fractured and frag- mented into interpenetrating geometric planes that produced brilliant contrasts of prismatic colors. Although his landscape and animal forms retained the dynamic force of his own expressionist view of nature, these were given order and direction by the Cubist planes, and intensity by Orphist color. The fusion of these traditions is present in Mountains of late 1912 (Fig. 6),51 painted just after his visit to Paris.

Klee was primarily a draftsman before his interest in color was stimulated by his association with the Blaue Reiter artists. The exhibition of Delaunay's paintings in Munich in 1911 and the meeting of the two artists further revealed to Klee the expressive possibilities of color as an element inde- pendent of line. A trip to Tunis in 1914 with Macke stimulated a new phase of brilliant color for both of them that was embodied in simple flat planes often freed from a representational end. He wrote in his diary at that time that "color has claimed me ... color and I are one. I am a painter."52 Klee's resourcefulness in drawing and color employed numerous techniques and motifs derived from Delaunay and the Cubists, such as the City of Towers, 1916 (Fig. 8), The Niessen, I9I5,53 and Hommage a Picasso, I9I4.54 The last is closer to Delaunay's style of color and avoidance of dark-light tonality than it is to Picasso.

The idea of the simultaneous contrast of brilliant colors was taken up by a group of other artists in Paris who met during the summer of 1913 at Delaunay's studio, among them Marc Chagall

48. Cited in Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, New York, 5I. See color reproductions of paintings of 1913, ibid., p. Abrams, 1954, p. 142. 14I; Haftmann, op.cit., p. 173.

49. For color reproductions of paintings of 1913-1914, see 52. Raynal, op.cit., p. Ioo. Gustav Vriesen, August Macke, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1953, 53. See color reproduction in Grohmann, op.cit., p. 127. esp. pp. 55, 8I, 93, IOI, 143. Macke's admiration for After this paper had gone to press I discovered a watercolor Delaunay's painting is described by Vriesen (pp. 114-118) by Paul Klee, entitled Fenster of 1919, where the direct in- where Macke writes that "Delaunay gives movement itself, fluence of Delaunay is unmistakable. It is composed of colorful the Futurists illustrate movement." For an analysis of Macke's geometric forms similar to those in Delaunay's Windows, but use of color to create light, see Max Imdahl, "Die Farbe als arranged in a looser and more fanciful relationship (Collec- Licht bei August Macke," August Macke (exhibition cata- tion of Hannah Becker vom Rath, Hofheim am Taunus, Ger- logue) Landesmuseum, Miinster, 1957. many. Reproduced in color in Hans Konrad Roethel, Modern

So. Alois J. Schardt, Franz Marc, Berlin, Rembrandt, 1936, German Painting, New York, Reynal, 1957 p. 42). p. 72. 54. See reproduction, Grohmann, op.cit., p. 131.

62

ORPHISM AND COLOR THEORY 63

and the Americans, Patrick Bruce,"5 S. Macdonald Wright,5 and Morgan Russell.7 In 1913 the three Americans launched the Synchromist movement that was heavily dependent upon Delaunay, both in its theory and in its brilliantly colored, nonfigurative forms. Their exhibitions in Munich and Paris were accompanied by considerable propaganda, much of it rejecting Delaunay's Orphism. Wright returned to America, followed by Russell, where Synchromism was hailed by his brother, the critic Willard H. Wright, as the newest modern movement. At home Wright developed and

taught to a large following his own color system that was based upon color chords with intervals

patterned after musical chords.58 Delaunay's burst of brilliant hues had anticipated and stimulated the colorfulness that was slowly

to return to Cubism during the succeeding decade.59 His most original period and the Orphist movement came to an end in I914, but for later artists it had established the idea of the inde-

pendent, expressive, and structural power of color as a basis for the further development of non-

figurative painting. 6

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

55. See a reproduction of Composition II, ca. 1917, in Collction of the Sociiti Anonyme, Yale University Art Gal- lery, New Haven, 1950, p. 142.

56. See a reproduction of Conception Synchromy, ca. '913, in Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression, Princeton, I955, p. 65.

57. See a color reproduction of Four Part Synchromism, No. 7, 1914, in Art News, LIv, November I955, cover. Russell was the leading figure in the Synchromist movement and the teacher of Wright. His work was reproduced by Apollinaire in Montjoie! in 1913 and 1914.

58. Wright, believing in the basic similarity of visual and aural stimuli, worked out a scale of twelve colors which he considered equivalent to the seven-tone musical scale. He con- structed a series of color chords with intervals like musical chords, and was convinced that he could translate color sensa- tions into corresponding musical sensations. His theories were doctrinaire, but he had realized the basic difference between painting in terms of dark-light values and painting in terms of color contrasts-a concept already developed by Delaunay in I9I2. See S. Macdonald Wright, A Treatise on Color, Los Angeles, privately printed, 1924, not illustrated. (Three of his color charts are reproduced in Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, xxI, 2, 1953-I954, p. 5.) His brother, W. H. Wright, was an important and respected critic who took up a defense of Synchromism, proclaiming it the culmination of all modern tendencies (Modern Painting, New York, John Lane, i915, ch. XIII).

Ostvald (op.cit., pp. 5-7) points out the basic physical dif- ferences between color sensations and musical sounds, namely that the pitch of musical sounds changes in proportion to change in the frequency of vibration, while with color a change of fre- quency of vibration produces an initial change in hue which eventually tends back toward the original hue. The musical scale is continuous from the lowest to the highest perceptible note, while the color spectrum that passes from red to violet almost returns to the original hue at the same time that the frequency of vibration approximately doubles. This anomaly, that was little understood by scientist and artist alike, seems to limit the possibilities of comparison of music and painting to poetic analogy only.

59. Hans Hofmann and Delaunay were close friends during the period discussed here and shared the conviction that the simultaneous contrasts of color could create form (see his recent essay "The Color Problem in Pure Painting-Its Creative Origin" in Frederick S. Wright, Hans Hofmann, Berkeley,

University of California Press, 1957, pp. 5I-56). Hofmann, like Delaunay, makes a distinction between the concept of tonal painting, where color is subservient to dark and light values, and simultaneous contrasts, where the entire area is color and creates light by its own contrasts. Tensions are produced between colors just as between planes, and both these tensions create the structure. Hofmann's teachings have been influential on a great number of leading abstract painters in America.

60. After this paper was completed an article appeared on Kupka: Lillian Lonngren, "Kupka: Innovator of the Abstract International Style," Art News, LVI, November 1957, pp. 44- 47, 54-56. Miss Lonngren shows that Kupka followed a con- sistent development from an academic version of the Art Nouveau pictorial style to completely nonfigurative works, and she shows that this development began as early as 1909. Both his styles go back to the earlier date; the geometric flat planes have their origin in an enlargement of Signac's orderly brush stroke, and the interlocking curvilinear forms are indebted at the early stage to Cubist analysis. Thus Kupka's precedence in arriving at nonfiguration seems to be demonstrated.

His interest in color theory could hardly fail to have been stimulated and influenced by his occasional participation in the discussions of the "Puteaux group" of painters, which met next door to his studio in Puteaux, comprised of the three Duchamp brothers, Gleizes, La Fresnaye, Leger, Metzinger, Picabia, the poet Apollinaire, and the American painter and critic Walter Pach (Bernard Dorival, Le Cubisme [exhibition catalogue] Paris, I953, p. 30). They were inclined toward theorizing; on mathematical means for composing a picture (their two exhibitions were entitled Section d'Or); on scientific theories of color, especially those of Rood, Signac, Henry, and Chevreul; and they speculated upon the possibility that paint- ing could achieve a degree of purity of form analogous to the purity of musical sounds. Both Picabia and Kupka were strong colorists, but they were concerned in their own state- ments more with the problem of the validity of nonrepresenta- tion than with color theories (see notes 6 and o). In a recent study of Synchromism, Michel Seuphor ("Synchromies," L'Oeil, January 1958, pp. 56-6i) proposes that although both Wright and Russell abandoned their abstract style a few years after they had launched the movement, they nevertheless figure among the ancestors of contemporary nonfigurative painting. This article includes a color reproduction of Wright's Syn- chromy of 1914 (p. 56).