Transcript
Tracey Bashkoff: Welcome to the Guggenheim. I’m Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Director of Collections, and Senior Curator.
Vivien Greene: And I’m Vivien Greene, Senior Curator of 19th and Early 20th Century Art. We curated this exhibition, "Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930."
Bellara Huang: I am Bellara Huang, Curatorial Assistant of Exhibitions, and I supported Tracey and Vivien over the last two years on this project.
Bashkoff: Here you’ll see artworks that explore themes of Orphism. Artists associated with Orphism sought to channel the innovations of the early twentieth century, which radically altered how people lived and thought, by capturing the simultaneity of modern existence in their art. Newer, faster modes of transport and communication changed conceptions of time and space, the aerial perspectives of early flight offered manifold viewpoints, and electric lighting animated the texture of the city streets at night. In their works artists also made tangible the dynamic rhythms of popular music and dance, especially early jazz and tango, by articulating the multiple physical sensations and movements occurring synchronously in contemporary cafés and dance halls.
Greene: Artists such as Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Mainie Jellett, František Kupka, Francis Picabia, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and Morgan Russell created kaleidoscopic compositions that often encompass disks of brilliant color and evoke multisensory experiences. When pushed to its limits, Orphism meant total abstraction.
Huang: A poet and critic, Guillaume Apollinaire invented the word “Orphism” to describe this art. He based it on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who played the lyre and whose magical music and song even moved stones and allowed him, if briefly, to beat death and save his love, Eurydice, from the underworld. The idea behind this term was that music is transcendent. It can convey feelings and sensations in the most ethereal and abstract form.
Bashkoff: Vivien and I have been curators at the museum for thirty years, but this is the first exhibition we have organized together.
Greene: It combines our respective areas of interest: I am an expert in Divisionism and Neo-Impressionism, and Tracey is an expert on Vasily Kandinsky and the Blue Rider group. The art and artists of these movements all had significant impact on the Orphist artists.
Huang: I have expertise in art of the Russian Empire and contributed in particular to research on artists from current-day Ukraine and Russia who were important presences for Orphism.
A quarter of the exhibition features artwork from our own collection—many even from our founding collection. Some of these paintings have never been exhibited! We spent many hours in our art-storage facilities viewing works and collaborating with our conservators, who had to treat some so we could include them in the show.
Greene: I’m a member of the Green Team at the museum, which is committed to incorporating sustainability into our work, including exhibition research and production. While organizing this exhibition, we traveled to many public and private collections in the United States and all over Europe (from Dublin to Prague and points in between) to view the artworks we hoped to include and to visit archives to learn more about the artists’ lives. Happily, we were able to combine travel for this exhibition with other work-related responsibilities, such as accompanying artworks on loan to other museums as couriers, which helped contain our carbon footprint.
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