Stanton Macdonald-Wright 1890 - 1973

Stendahl Art Gallery, Los Angeles
Joseph H. Hazen, by 1967
Cynthia Polsky, New York
Acquired by the present owner in 2006

New York, Charles Daniel Gallery, 1918, no. 8 (as Still Life Synchromy in Red)
Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, A Retrospective Showing of the Work of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, 1956, no. 5
Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, The Art of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, 1967, no. 12, p. 28
Los Angeles, California, The UCLA Art Galleries and the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, A Retrospective Exhibition 1911-1970, 1970, no. 8
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, no. 114, illustrated
Tulsa, Oklahoma, Philbrook Art Center; Oakland, California, Oakland Museum; Baltimore, Maryland, Baltimore Museum of Art; New York, National Academy of Design, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1939, 1981, p. 240, illustrated in color pl. 27, p. 171
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, American Modernism: The Shein Collection, May 2010-January 2011, no. 10, pp. 4, 68, 70-71, 124, 139-40, illustrated in color p. 69

Debra Bricker Balken, "Dual Advocacy," Hali, Summer 2013, illustrated in color p. 68

Painted in 1917, Still-Life Synchromy epitomizes Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s fully developed synchromist aesthetic. Meaning “with color,” synchromism was jointly founded in 1913 by Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. As these American painters were its only official practioners, synchromism existed as a formal movement for only a little more than a year. From 1911 to 1915, however, Macdonald-Wright was deeply entrenched in the artistic milieu of the Parisian avant-garde through both his writings and paintings, and contributed significantly to the dialogue on abstraction in the first decades of the 20^th century.

Macdonald-Wright returned to New York from Paris in 1915 and continued to paint in the synchromist style, while exhibiting his work at several important galleries for modern art, including Alfred Stieglitz’s famed 291 Gallery. Simultaneously, the artist produced many of his most ambitious works, many of which reveal the deep inspiration he drew from his time abroad. Macdonald-Wright was particularly influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne, which he encountered upon his arrival in Paris in 1909 (fig. 1) Explain William C. Agee and Will South, “In 1916 and early 1917, [Macdonald-Wright] painted several literal Cézannesque still lifes, as if he were starting from the beginning in his study of the master, then moved on to the more abstract still-life format seen here. A number of his variations on paintings by the master evolved into synchromist works in which tabletop objects turned into blurred prismatic patterns of ever-brighter color. So, too, Macdonald-Wright used a carefully disguised human figure as the basis for abstractions by 1914” (American Modernism: The Shein Collection, Washington, D.C., 2010, p. 71).

In Still-Life Synchromy, Macdonald-Wright depicts two figures behind a table holding several objects typically associated with still-life including an apple, a pitcher and possibly a stack of books. Although the work is rooted in representation, all of these elements are sharply reduced and fragmented into geometric planes and circular shapes of shimmering color. These latter forms, arranged so they appear to cascade across the picture plane, were inspired by Macdonald-Wright’s admiration for Michelangelo and the contrapposto he applied to sculpt the human frame in his work Dying Slave. Macdonald-Wright’s experimentation with color abstraction deepened 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. Color alone, they argued, could be used to define forms and space within a two-dimensional picture plane, and had the capacity to communicate emotion.

Russell introduced Macdonald-Wright to the ideas of Percyval Tudor-Hart, a Canadian painter and color theorist working in Paris at the time. Using Tudor-Hart’s theories on the musical character of color as a foundation, Macdonald-Wright and Russell drew a simplified 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 at the time and it became essential to Macdonald-Wright and Russell as they developed their new vision of modern art: the term “Synchromism,” which Russell claimed to have coined in 1913, is derived in part from the word “symphony.” Only a short time later, the sychromist consideration of color as the principle means of expression would critically influence the work of such mid-century American painters as Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Thomas Hart Benton (fig. 2).

Agee and South continue, “Still-Life Synchromy is painted in the scale of red, which is composed of the tonic red, followed by orange, yellow, yellow green, blue green, blue violet, and red violet. On the heels of his New York Years, Macdonald-Wright wrote A Treatise on Color that describes in detail how to arrive at these scales, as well as their emotional meaning. Of the red color scale, the artist wrote, ‘Red is the great energetic contrast scale. It is beautifully harmonized, is simple and honest, but to see and to feel the beauty of this scale requires more sensitivity than for most other scales’ (Stanton Macdonald-Wright, A Treatise on Color, Los Angeles, 1924, p. 25)…In [works like Still-Life Synchromy], Macdonald-Wright blended the fluid qualities of watercolor with an application of thinned oil, thus creating diaphanous surfaces, the perfect medium for these light-filled, atmospheric paintings. This looks ahead to the even softer application of paint in his California works, a look and sensibility that later permeated California art…The thinned paint of the 1917-1918 work predicts Macdonald-Wright’s later development of a color-light projection system, the ultimate dematerialization of painterly color” (Ibid., p. 71).