What is Orphism?
Our dear readers following Google Art enjoyed the piece on Rayonism. Alok Mehta wants to know what Orphism is—a term mentioned in our earlier piece. Orphism is also a religion practiced by the Ancient Greeks. It was dedicated to the cult of the Greek God of poetry and music, Orpheus.

However, the ideology found its way to art and in 1912, the term Orphism was used by poet Guillaume Apollinaire to describe the paintings of the leading artist Robert Delaunay—a Paris-based artist. Delaunay and his contemporaries were also part of the group Der Blaue Reiter in 1912 that exhibited alongside the Rayonists. This movement is also known as Orphic Cubism, since artists like Delaunay’s displayed elements of a Cubist style in their art work and paintings.

The main appeal of Orphism is to charm the senses. The paintings were constructed with overlapping planes of contrasting colors usually arranged in circular discs. The colour combinations were based on the laws of simultaneous contrast of colors that was developed by French chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul in the 19th century.

According to Chevreul, colours like blue and yellow, green and magenta, red and cyan are complementary. These are colours that lie opposite each other on the VIBGYOR scale, better known as the seven colours in the rainbow.

According to Chevreul’s study and several after him, if one stares long enough at a dominant colour like red, green or blue and then looks at a white space, one will see that a complementary colour will appear in its place. This happens because the retina, after staring long at the colour, gets tired and can only reproduce the complementary colour to the brain.

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