Featuring over 90 artworks this major exhibition examines the seminal experiments in Paris in abstract form and pure color, labelled Orphism by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912. The exhibition explores the movement’s development through the 1920s and the impact dance, music, poetry but also modern spiritualism, science and technology had on the art of the time. Artists connected to Orphism engaged with ideas of simultaneity in kaleidoscopic compositions, investigating the transformative possibilities of color, form, and motion.

The museum’s iconic rotunda beautifully complements the discs and color wheels in the paintings, emphasizing the vibrant energy of an art movement born of the revolutionary optimism of the period immediately before the catastrophe of the First World War. Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, František Kupka, Francis Picabia, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, and the American Synchromists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, are the main artists on view.