Orphism and Color Theory

Abstract

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 evolution 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 d'Avignon 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.