The wave that explained itself
Picasso and Braque never wrote a manifesto and rarely exhibited. The painters who turned Cubism into a public movement were the second wave, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (the theorists), Fernand Léger (who pushed it toward gleaming tubes and pistons), Robert Delaunay (toward pure color), and the Spaniard Juan Gris (toward a tight, almost mathematical order). All French or Paris-based, all younger, they showed at the big open Salons, argued in the cafés, and in 1912 did the unthinkable: they turned a style into a theory. Gleizes and Metzinger published Du Cubisme, the first book on the movement, and a sprawling group show called the Section d’Or (“Golden Section,” after the classical proportion) gathered dozens of them under one roof. Cubism now had a name, a literature and a crowd.
Their champion was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a one-man label factory who reviewed the shows, defended them in print, and minted names the way a mint makes coins, he christened Delaunay’s color-drunk, near-abstract variant Orphism (after Orpheus, because he thought it worked on you like music). Robert Delaunay rarely worked alone: his partner Sonia Delaunay drove the same color experiments and carried them off the canvas entirely, into fabric, fashion and book design, which is a large part of why Orphism outlived the painting room.
The freight train reaches America
In February 1913 a vast show called the Armory Show opened in a New York drill hall and dragged European modern art in front of the American public for the first time. The succès de scandale (a hit precisely because it caused a scandal) was a Cubo-Futurist canvas by Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase: a figure smeared into a cascade of overlapping slats, less a nude than the photographic blur of one walking downstairs. A baffled critic called it “an explosion in a shingle factory”; a newspaper cartoonist redrew it as “the rude descending a staircase, rush hour at the subway.” People queued to be outraged. And then American collectors started buying. The center of gravity of modern art was still firmly in Paris, but a wire had just been strung across the Atlantic, and thirty years later the current would reverse.