Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The Guggenheim Museum owes its famous spiral to a little-known artistic movement that emerged in Paris just over 100 years ago. The movement was called Orphism, a name that references Greek mythology and Cubism. In designing the Guggenheim's unique building, Architect Frank Lloyd Wright specifically was inspired by Orphism paintings in the museum's collection.

A major examination of Orphism opens at the Guggenheim this Friday, including 82 pieces from 26 artists. The pieces are full of color and movement, which was influenced by the rapidly changing cosmopolitan setting of Paris, where these artists were living and working. Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930 is open to the public starting Friday and is on view through March 9th. Tracey Bashkoff, Guggenheim senior director of collections and curator, is our guest. Hi, Tracey.

Tracey Bashkoff: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Also joining us is Vivien Greene, senior curator of 19th and earliest 20th-century art. Hi, Vivien.

Vivien Greene: Hi. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm good, thanks. Let's start with the word Orphism itself. It was coined by a poet in 1912. Who came up the term, and how does it connect to the the art associated with the movement? Who wants to take that, Tracey or Vivien?

Vivien Greene: I'll go ahead and take that. Actually, a Franco-Polish poet named Guillaume Apollinaire, who was also an art critic, coined the term Orphism to describe art that was moving away from Cubism into a more abstract direction. He takes the word Orphism from the name Orpheus, that is the Greek myth figure, Orpheus, who was a bard and lyre player and transcends death with his music. For those who've seen Hadestown or Chaos, it's probably a familiar figure at this point, but the idea being that music is the most ephemeral and abstract of the arts. Thus the abstraction that Apollinaire was seeing in painting reminded him of the abstraction of which music was capable.

Alison Stewart: Tracey, in representing Orphism, the title of the exhibition includes the words harmony and dissonance. Why do these two words, harmony and dissonance, make sense in understanding the big ideas behind Orphism?

Tracey Bashkoff: Great question. Harmony and dissonance. Well, the sources for harmony and dissonance are twofold for the exhibition from color theory. The orificed artists were looking to 19th-century color theorists for inspiration and the artists that follow them. Harmony and dissonance were terms that they used in order to describe the relationships between color. It was a comfortable phrase, but also because of the music connection, as Vivien mentioned, not just with Orpheus, but the artists themselves looked to music and as a inspiration for making their work more and more abstract.

The way that music can convey emotion and content and feeling so directly, they were looking to be able to do the same with their artworks. The harmony and dissonance represents also sort of both ends of the spectrum, you know, the kind of quality of things getting along, but also dissonance, which is not necessarily a negative term, but talks about the difference and discordance of things. Vivien, you might want to add something.

Vivien Greene: Sure. As Tracey was saying, of course, the idea of music and musical composition was very important to a lot of these artists, not just classical music. Some look to Bach and the fugue, and some just to Beethoven, the sonata form, but others look to popular music, early jazz and ragtime. The idea of rhythm and syncopation.

Anyway, all this musical terminology really informed how they were thinking about art making. They were trying to transpose what you could do in a musical composition into a visual composition. Then we also had a bit of a historical framework for the terminology because, of course, in this moment, as you mentioned, Alison, of great transformation and change. Technology, there was new modes of communication, transportation, flight, the metro. Everything changed how people lived, conceptions of time and space.

That led to a lot of utopian ideals about what technologies could do for social change to make our lives better, but as we all know, innovation and technology can also be very disruptive to life. The modern aspects of life can be difficult as well. Then, since our exhibition really focuses primarily on the early teens through the mid-teens, of course, the dissonance portion refers to the advent of World War I, which changed the course of what many artists did pursuant to that war in 1918.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking about the new exhibition at the Guggenheim opening this Friday called Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930. I'm speaking with Tracey Bashkoff and Vivien Greene from the Guggenheim. This is the Guggenheim's first in-depth study and presentation of Orphism. Tracey, why do you think the movement has maybe been a little bit overlooked in art history as compared to others and its contemporaries?

Tracey Bashkoff: Well, probably for one reason is that it's even hard to call it a movement. It was really a word that was used to describe something that was going on and to categorize these artists that were loosely working at the same time, but not really together, you know, with a manifesto and a direction, but instead as sort of a transnational group that was in Paris and working with the same ideas. It becomes a really wonderful, handy term to apply to the work that's really pushing the limits of abstraction at this moment.

We have words that categorize other work, like Cubism, as you mentioned, and this term, when Guillaume Apollinaire coined it, he first called it Orphic Cubism. It was coming out of Cubism, but then it goes further, and the work shares aesthetic qualities of brilliant color and discs of color and to capture these experiences of modern life. It's been understudied in the past because it wasn't quite as solid as a movement as some others from that time period.

Alison Stewart: Vivien, what was something that you learned in your research about Orphism that surprised you or a detail that you wanted to include in the show?

Vivien Greene: I think, sort of picking up on something that Tracey was mentioning, is it was extraordinary to find that there were all these artists that were active in Paris in this rather tight period of time, but they weren't all French. They came from everywhere. They came from what is today known as Belarus and Ukraine and Portugal, the United States, Switzerland. This wonderful moment of transnationalism, and that really, each artist, while, again, they were referencing a lot of the same sources, whether the color theory, the simultaneity of modern life, of course, is very key to them as well, they each brought their own kind of artistic sources to it.

A work by Sonia Delaunay does not look exactly like a work by Francis Picabia, and yet there are resonances between them. The same could be said about František Kupka, and maybe an American such as Morgan Russell. It was this incredible web that brought them all together. Constellation, we like to call it, that I found just fascinating and also very inspiring.

Alison Stewart: As I mentioned, there were 26 artists in this show, Tracey. What were the necessary qualities of a piece of art or an artist to be included in Orphism?

Tracey Bashkoff: Yes, so there were actually some artists that Apollinaire named as Orphist artists. We started with that as kind of our nugget in the center of the exhibition, and then branched out, and we really-- it came about, about looking at what the artworks looked like. Again, as Vivien mentioned, this sort of wide group of artists.

In fact, there are many artists in the exhibition who one wouldn't necessarily call orificed, or they weren't very orificed for very long, and they may have done something for just a moment that crossed into these categories of the way they dealt with light, the way they dealt with color and form and the push towards abstraction that qualifies them as an Orphist artist at this moment, but then they went on to do very different things.

Alison Stewart: What were they doing in Paris? Did they all know each other? I'm making it romantic, but I'm wondering, did the artists all know each other?

Vivien Greene: For the most, part they did. I mean, that was another way in, in our research to identify a sort of trace, also ideas of transmission, how people learn. There were salons in Paris that they all frequented at different artists' homes. There were cafes that they all went to. Not all. Some went to one cafe, some went to another salon, but there overlap ultimately amongst almost all of them.

They exhibited in the same exhibitions from the Salon des Independants in Paris to the first autumn exhibition in Berlin in 1913. They're also seeing each other's work. Sometimes they were quite close. I mean, at some point, Apollinaire lived with the Delaunays. I mean, you have great proximity. Then the Delaunays went to Spain and Portugal during World War I, and they have contact with Portuguese artists there, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso and Eduardo Viana, who had been friends of theirs in Paris. Also, you see friendships re-knit themselves together in different geographies.

Alison Stewart: For our listeners who are interested in seeing some of Robert Delaunay's work, you can see it on our Instagram, @allofitwnyc. A lot of people may recognize a little bit of his work, his abstract renditions of the Eiffel Tower. First of all, why was he so fascinated with the Eiffel Tower?

Tracey Bashkoff: Well, the Eiffel Tower was just really became a symbol of modernity to the artists at this time. Not just the visual artists, but the poets as well. It was built in 1889, and really just became this-- a beacon really, both actually for sending out transmissions and coordinating time zones and such, but also a beacon for the artists. It just also dominated the landscape, the urban landscape of Paris. It appears, I don't know, I think we were counting how many Eiffel Towers are spread throughout the paintings and the exhibition. Something like 11, I think, works in the exhibition that have Eiffel Towers in them.

Alison Stewart: I did want to get to before we run out of time. The Guggenheim is celebrating its 65th anniversary this year. Frank Lloyd Wright specifically designed the museum with Orphism in mind. How so?

Vivien Greene: Well, he had a number of things in mind when he designed the museum. These paintings, or some of them were definitely informing that. In fact, a quarter of the exhibition is drawn from the Guggenheim's own collection. People will see works we've never exhibited before. Quite a few of them are from our founding collection, so exactly what Frank Lloyd Wright would have been looking at when he was designing the exhibition.

I'll say one sort of humorous story is when we often are looking closely at one of these works, we keep on seeing the footprint of the plan of the building in the spirals and spinning shapes of the painting. There are these really extraordinary echoes between the architecture and the painting that you experience when you visit the show.

Alison Stewart: That's amazing. When you're thinking about the influence of Orphism in art that would succeeded or even in art today, where do we see the influence?

Tracey Bashkoff: There are contemporary artists. Well, the exhibition actually, you know, goes into the 1930s and to artists that sort of came in a little later into the vocabulary of Orphism. We do even know that there are contemporary artists today, artists such as Vik Muniz or-- name another, Vivien.

Vivien Greene: Well, Sanford Biggers has a wonderful quilt evoking Orpheus that also looks, to my eye anyway, quite orificed. The Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes, and also an artist who is no longer with us but relative to contemporary, such as Mike Kelley, there are these sort of homages to the Delaunays or to Orphism I think the interest in color and abstraction is something that held strong throughout.

Alison Stewart: If you had to pick one piece for people to stand, spend an extra 10 seconds in front of, what would you pick, Vivien? Go.

Vivien Greene: Oh, I think I would pick the very large-scale Picabia that is in the first, what we call the high gallery, the museum. It has an unpronounceable name, which is an anagram of the words etoile and dance, star and dancer. It's a painting about a dancer on the ocean liner that he took from France to New York in 1913. It's extraordinary movement. You can't identify anyone in it but you-- it's like a jigsaw puzzle of shapes and colors. He also used some metallic pigment. It's the largest painting in the exhibition, so it's really immersive.

Alison Stewart: Okay, Tracey, you've got 30 seconds. Your favorite picture.

Tracey Bashkoff: It's a Kupka painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art that's also on the cover of our catalog. It's about Newton and light and movement and the planets. It just brings it all together and really sums things up.

Alison Stewart: It's called Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930. It is at the Guggenheim opening this Friday. My guests have been Tracey Bashkoff and Vivien Greene from the Guggenheim. Thanks so much, and enjoy the opening.

Tracey Bashkoff: Thank you.

Vivien Greene: Thank you for having us. Bye-bye.

Alison Stewart: Coming up, a new Off-Broadway play in the Amazon Warehouse parking lot follows a group of workers traveling from job to job to voice rising sea levels. We'll speak with the playwright. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you, and I will meet you back here tomorrow.