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.