Stanton Macdonald-Wright
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ONE OF THE militant vanguard of American abstract painters in the early years of the 20th century was the young Stanton Macdonald-Wright who, with his friend Morgan Russell, founded the Synchromist movement. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, on July 8, 1890, Macdonald-Wright began to study art when he was only seven. In 1900 he moved to California where he was educated in public and private schools as well as by tutors. At seventeen he went abroad for the first time, living principally in Paris and Cassis, France. During his first four months in the French capital he managed to attend thirteen different art schools, finally settling down at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Sorbonne. Michelangelo and Céanne were his favorite painters at this time, but soon he was deeply impressed by the work of the cubists, which was first shown in Paris in 1908. By 1912 he and Russell were also doing abstract and semi-abstract work, called "synchromies," which they exhibited at the Carrol Gallery in New York in 1913, then in Munich and at Bernheim-Jeune's in Paris later the same year.
Synchromism owed a heavy debt to cubism but the young Americans sought to remake that movement in terms of deep space and dynamic motion. To do this they used the brilliant colors of the spectrum, which seem to recede or advance according to their arrangement and hue. Handled with great sensitivity by Macdonald-Wright, the effect is somewhat like that of a brilliant and constantly shifting kaleidoscope. At almost precisely the same time, a group of French artists known as the Orphists were working in a similar vein. With them the Americans waged a spirited battle of manifestoes, even challenging Delaunay, their leader, to hang his best painting in their Bernheim-Jeune exhibition so that the public could judge the respective merits of the two movements. Actually neither Orphism nor Synchromism lasted long or attracted many followers, but both were important steps in the rapid growth of abstract art.
Macdonald-Wright, himself, gave up Synchromism about 1919 and went to study in California and later in the far east. He did not exhibit again until 1932, and since then his work has frequently changed direction. For many years he had taught Oriental and modern art at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Macdonald-Wright: Every color has its own position in emotional space and possesses a well defined character. I conceive of space itself as endowed with plastic meaning, expressed through color. Since form is not the volume of each object seen separately, I organized my canvas as a whole, as much in depth as on the surface . . . With us the quality of depth provokes a subjective emotion.
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