Stanton Macdonald-Wright 1890 - 1973

Daniel Gallery, New York, by 1932
Sidney and Harriet Janis, New York, circa 1959
Gift to the present owner from the above, 1967

Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, A Retrospective Showing of the Work of Stanton Macdonald-Wright: A Loan Exhibition, January-February, 1956, no. 11
Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts,The Art of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, May-June 1967, no. 21
New York, Museum of Modern Art; Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Portland, Maine, The Portland Museum of Art; Pasadena, California, Pasadena Art Museum; San Francisco, California, San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum; Dallas, Texas, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art; Basel, Switzerland, Kunsthalle Basel; London, England, Institute of Contemporary Arts; Berlin, Germany, Akademie der Künste; Stuttgart, Germany, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; Brussels, Belgium, Palais des Beaux-Arts; Cologne, Germany, Kunsthalle Cologne, The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection; A Gift to the Museum of Modern Art, January 1968-April 1971
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Houston, Texas, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Des Moines, Iowa, Des Moines Art Center; San Francisco, California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Syracuse, New York, Everson Museum of Art; Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910-1925, January 1978-March 1979, p. 140, pl. 115, illustrated
Providence, Rhode Island, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Over Here: Modernism, The First Exile, 1914-1919,  April-May 1989, no. 44
San Antonio, Texas, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute; Logan, Utah, Nora Eccles Harrison Art Museum, Utah State University; Santa Barbara, California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, January-October 1991, p. 90
Raleigh, North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of Art; Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Houston, Texas, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, March 2001-February 2002, no. 20, illustrated in color pp. x, 181

Three Generations of Twentieth Century Art: The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972, p. 20, illustrated p. 21
Piri Halasz, "American Synchromism: Pleasures and Peccadilloes of an Imperfect Show," Art News 78, January 1979, pp. 88-9

This painting is in very good condition. Lined. Under UV: there are a few old spots of inpainting in the yellow pigments of the flowers (at center, left and top), a few pindots of inpainting in the greens at left, one tiny dot in the pink at center and a few in the extreme upper left and upper right corners.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Meaning “with color,” the aesthetic movement known as Synchromism had only two official members and existed as a formal movement for only a little more than a year. Jointly founded in 1913 by the American painters Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, Synchromism existed in relative obscurity for many years. Enjoying comparatively minimal popular awareness or scholarly attention, it has often been mislabeled as merely a derivative corollary to the work of other, better-known painters of the time, particularly Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Through both his writings and paintings, however, Macdonald-Wright deeply entrenched himself in the artistic milieu of the Parisian avant-garde from 1911 to 1915, and contributed immensely to the dialogue on abstraction in the first decades of the 20^th century. As exemplified by the 1919 canvas Trumpet Flowers, the Synchromist reverence for color as the most fundamental means of expression would prove profoundly influential on the development of modern art in the United States.

Born in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1890, Macdonald-Wright moved to Southern California with his family in 1900, where they owned and operated a hotel in the small seaside town of Santa Monica. The family’s success and relative affluence afforded Macdonald-Wright the luxury of private tutoring that included lessons in painting. Then dominating the aesthetics of the California art scene, the tenets of Impressionism deeply informed Macdonald-Wright’s earliest education in the discipline; he was extensively trained with an adherence to the movement’s emphasis on painting en plein air. Decades later, the artist would also credit the French Impressionists, as well as the British painter J.M.W. Turner, with exposing him to the possibilities of using color in a nontraditional manner.

Deciding to pursue the arts professionally, Macdonald-Wright arrived in Paris in the fall of 1909 to hone his craft in the center of the art world. As was typical of American painters living abroad, Macdonald-Wright studied in several established art schools including the Académie Julian. The fiercely intellectual and experimental young painter, however, found himself increasingly drawn to the radically different aesthetic approaches readily accessible in Paris, as the city was quickly becoming an important hub for the development of abstraction in painting, sculpture and a wide variety of other media. Exploring the country’s storied institutions of fine art, he also immersed himself in the work of the great French modern masters including Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and, most significantly, Paul Cézanne. Although he ultimately came to view Matisse and Gauguin as still too decorative in their application of color, Macdonald-Wright was astonished by Cézanne’s revolutionary technique of applying warm and cool colors to indicate the advance and recession of space on a two-dimensional surface (Fig. 2).

Macdonald-Wright’s experimentation with color abstraction would deepen upon his introduction to a fellow American painter and sculptor, Morgan Russell, in 1911. The two artists quickly discovered their shared concern for prioritizing the role of color, which until now—they believed—all painters in the history of Western art had failed to completely achieve. Color alone, they argued, had the capacity to communicate the greatest human emotions and could be used to produce both forms and depth within the pictorial plane. Along with instigating his friend’s education in three-dimensional sculptural form, specifically the work of Michelangelo, Russell also introduced Macdonald-Wright to the ideas of Percyval Tudor-Hart, a Canadian painter and color theorist working in Paris at the time. Tudor-Hart shared the painters’ interest in exploring the musical character of color, and designed a complex system of relating specific colors to specific musical notes in varying octaves. Using this system as a foundation, Macdonald-Wright and Russell drew an analogy between the 12 tone musical scale and the 12 colors on a standard color wheel. Just as several notes were needed to create a harmonious chord with a guitar, they reasoned, they could combine and arrange varying hues of color together to create a visually harmonious composition. The color-sound analogy was one that many artists were exploring during this time and it became essential to Macdonald-Wright and Russell as they developed and ultimately articulated their new vision of modern art. Indeed the term “Synchromism,” which Russell claimed to have coined in 1913, is derived in part from the word “symphony.” By applying color to a canvas according to these principles, Macdonald-Wright and Russell sought to liberate it from all representative associations and achieve an overall compositional and psychological harmony. On a formal level, they allowed color to become the basis of multiple elements of pictorial design including light, line and solid matter.

Believing that they had “finally solved the great problem of form and color,” the newly formed Synchromists held two exhibitions devoted to this aesthetic in 1913, in both Munich and Paris (Fig. 1). These exhibits received wide critical and public attention, helping to ensure color painting as a fundamental component of the development of abstraction. In 1915, Macdonald-Wright left Paris for New York, where he continued to paint in the Synchromist style and exhibited at several important galleries for modern art, including Alfred Stieglitz's famed 291 Gallery. The artist’s work, however, failed to garner much attention beyond these specialized circles, and his financial situation forced him to return to California in 1918. The move home engendered a stylistic change in Macdonald-Wright’s work: while he continued to explore Synchromist principles, the canvases he began to produce display the incorporation of a number of diverse influences. The most significant of these is a remarkable return to figuration.

Painted in 1919, Trumpet Flowers is a radiant example of the visually stunning and complex work Macdonald-Wright executed during his California period. As indicated by the title, the artist has clearly allowed for the return to associative imagery in the present work. The canvas, however, is far from purely representational. The ethereal and diaphanous quality of Trumpet Flowers—achieved through a thinner application of paint typical of this period—is dreamily atmospheric, undoubtedly evoking the pure and brilliant glow that permeates the California landscape. The artist has rendered the distinctive blossoms of his subject with the cascading circular shapes typical of the Synchromist aesthetic, originally inspired by Russell’s admiration for the work of Michelangelo and the dramatic “S-curve” with which he sculpted the human frame. The hues of shimmering blues and oranges juxtaposed with fiery reds and greens fold upon themselves and swirl together on the surface, imbuing the rendered image of flowers with a sculptural, physical presence that almost defies two-dimensionality. Suggesting that the space within the picture plane extends into the space beyond, Trumpet Flowers undoubtedly radiates with the expressive power of color that is essential to Macdonald-Wright’s oeuvre, inspiring the work of many significant American painters of the mid-20th century including Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Thomas Hart Benton (Fig. 3).