Stanton Macdonald-Wright 1890 - 1973

Rose Fried Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Walter Nelson Pharr (acquired from the above)
Gift to the present owner from the above, 1965

New York, Rose Fried Gallery, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, February 1965, no. 9

This work is in very good condition. Under UV: there are three dots of inpainting in the lower left corner.
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Founded in Paris in 1913 by the American painters Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, the aesthetic movement known as Synchromism, meaning "with color," existed in relative obscurity, lasting for little more than a year. The movement took Orphism, a form of cubism based on color, led by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, as its point of departure. Through his writings and paintings, Macdonald-Wright contributed immensely to the dialogue on abstraction during the first decades of the 20^th century. Painted in 1962, Embarkation is a vibrant example of Macdonald-Wright’s mature work, exemplifying the Synchromist reverence for color as the fundamental means of expression.

After experimenting with a more diverse range of aesthetics for much of the 1930s and 40s, Macdonald-Wright returned to painting in the classically Synchromist style with renewed fervor in 1954. He spoke excitedly of his new work that year, saying, "I had naturally...conceived of a characteristic type of expression when I was twenty-one, and now found that that former expression was still characteristic of me, that's all. I am now painting the same kind of pictures I painted at my earliest period—better I trust—at least they look better to me" (Will South, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2001, p. 153). Often executed in large-scale, these mature paintings reflect a strict observance to the color scales that had been the foundation of his work in Paris. Just as several notes are needed to create a harmonious chord with a guitar, Macdonald-Wright believed he could combine and arrange varying hues of color to create a visually harmonious image. In the present work, color becomes the basis of the composition, and informs the artist’s approach to form and line. Pushing his Synchromist theories further, Macdonald-Wright also chose to give his paintings more conceptual titles, likely to ensure they were free from all representative associations.

Although these ideas were central to his earlier work, Macdonald-Wright believed his mature achievement of an “interior realism” differentiated his later pictures. The artist explained this transformation by saying: “This is a sense of reality which cannot be seen but which is evident by feeling, and I am certain that this hidden reality was what I felt to be lacking in my younger days. This quality can be created neither by intellectual means nor by the will. It is necessary that the artist be ‘taken over’ by an all-encompassing idea…that is to say that the artist must entirely ‘become’ that which he paints” (Ibid., p. 153).