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Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) was an United
States|American artist, specifically a painter. He
was born in Virginia, United States|USA. He
studied in Paris, where he encountered such famous
artists as Picasso, Matisse and CĂ©zanne. At this
time, he met another US artist, Morgan Russell,
and they invented 'Synchromism', an art movement
which wants to create emotion with colour. In
1915, during WW1, he left the Parisian art world
for the new New York art world, and after for
southern California, to which he brought the
'gospel' of modern art, and established the first
exposition of modern art in Los Angeles.

He was one of the first occidental (western)
artists to become interested in Zen and oriental
art and culture. In his later years, more and more
frequently he visited Japan. He relinquished his
abstract style, and had a period of figurative
pictures, inspired by (and using) Japanese forms
and colours. In the final years of his life, he
returned to Synchromism, but his colours were more
clement, tranquil and contemplative; much inspired
by the Japanese art and philosophy.

=== 1 Earlier Influences and Europe (1890 –
1912) ===

Stanton Macdonald-Wright was born 1890, in
Chalottesville, Virginia, USA. His father was an
amateur painter, and encouraged the young
Stanton's interest in art. When Stanton was 10
years old, the family moved to Santa Monica,
California. Resisting his family's pressure to aim
for a career in medicine, Stanton attempted
(unsuccessfully) to run away to Japan, and
(successfully) to study Art in Los Angeles.

In 1907, aged seventeen and married (last year) to
a well-off woman of 27 years, he went to Paris, to
enjoy the bohemian life of the avant garde artist
(though without the usually associated poverty).
He later says 'I felt at home in European
traditions because, ... I had had to speak French
always at dinner and Spanish at lunch, so I was
really trilingual as a kid'. He also studied at
various art institutions, including the Sorbonne,
where he met Henri Focillion, who introduced him
to oriental art and philosophy.

:"I became interested in Oriental art through
probably the greatest aesthetician with whom I
studied at the Sorbonne, in Paris, when I was a
very young man over there. His name was Focillon.
He is the man who is recognized, I guess all over
the world, as being the greatest aesthetician of
modern times; he is a very sweet fellow. And he
said to me one day, 'I know nothing about Oriental
art, but I think there is a great deal in it'."
– Stanton, speaking in 1964

It is worth noting that 1907 is the year Picasso
painted 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', the painting
considered to signify the birth of modern art.
Stanton collected art, including works by
Cèzanne, by whom he was (like everyone else, it
must be said) heavily influenced.

:"Every modern painting that existed, from the
time of Cèzanne, was influenced by Cèzanne.
Cèzanne was a great spring, out of which many of
those boys men like Othon Friesz would take a
cupful; but the spring was still there, gushing.
And without Cèzanne there never would have been
any devolvement of modern painting."
– Stanton, speaking in 1964

In 1911, he visited London, Rotterdam, Amsterdam,
Dordrecht, Antwerp and Brussels. He met Morgan
Russell, another US expatriate. Russell took him
to the atelier of Percyval Tudor-Harte, an English
colour-theorist and painter (and, according to
Stanton 'perfectly stark-raving mad'). The two
studied and worked with Tudor-Harte, and studied
colour-theory profoundly.

Stanton and Russell attended the various soirées
of Gertrude and Leo Stein, where Stanton met
Picasso, Rodin, and Matisse. He also knew Man Ray
and many other now-famous artists in Paris at that
time.

In 1912, when Vorticism was coming of age in
England, and Cubism was in its most productive
phase, Stanton and Russell founded Synchromism, an
abstract offshoot of cubism that considered colour
to be the raw material of art. It closely
resembles the Orphism practiced by Robert Delaunay
at the same time. This seems to have been pointed
out before, and Stanton rebukes:

:"It has nothing to do with Orphism and anybody
who has read the first catalogue of Synchromism of
the Bernheim Jeune exhibition of 1913, or of the
Nue Kunst Salon Exhibition in Munich of the same
year would realize that we poked fun at Orphism
and at Delaunay in spite of the fact the Delaunay
was a good friend of mine. ... The reason we were
likened to it Orphism is because we were the first
people to break away from the monochromatic type
of work that was done by Cubism at that time.

he moves on to the similarities

:They Synchromism and Orphism were both color.
Delaunay had a very delicate sense of color, a
very charming sense of color. Delaunay was
probably right in the French tradition of its most
magnificent decorative quality, just as Braque was
afterward."
– Stanton, speaking in 1964

Like Kandinsky, Vorticism, and other
then-contemporary abstract artists and movements,
Synchomism explained itself in terms of music.
Synchromist paintings were called 'Synchromies', a
word which closely resembles 'Symphonies'.

:"These two artists believed that color had sound
equivalents, and the word synchromy means 'with
color' the way symphony means 'with sound'. They
believed that by painting in color scales in the
same way that one composes with musical scales,
you could create paintings that would evoke in the
viewer musical sensations. Europeans at that time
knew about these theories and were riled up =
excited about them."
– Will South, Curator, 'Color, Myth, and
Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism'

=== 2 The War Period (1913 – 1918) ===

:"In freeing ourselves from certain previous
restraints and stepping boldly into the unknown,
we have been able to wrest from nature its secret
in order to bring painting to its highest point of
intensity."
– Stanton Macdonald-Wright & Morgan Russell

In 1913, Stanton and Russell held two two-man
expositions, one in Munich, the other in Paris.
The pair then moved to New York, and Stanton
separated from his wife. The next year, 1914, they
shared another exposition in New York. In their
introduction in the exhibition catalogue, they
wrote:

:"Besides solving the problem of the inherent
nature of colors in their relation to form, we
have applied ourselves to a close study of the
harmonious relation of these colors to one
another. And, as a result of the incorporation of
these colors into gamut-form, they convey the
notion of time in painting. They give the illusion
that the canvas develops like music, in time,
while both the old and modern paintings exist
strictly in space. With one glance they can be
felt in their entirety."

They then moved back to Paris, and on to London
due to the war. They stay with Stanton's older
brother, Willard Huntington-Wright. In 1915
Stanton and Willard co-author and publish a book,
'Modern Art: Its Tendency and Meaning'. They then
move to New York, USA, and the brothers both help
to organise an ambitious but disappointing group
exposition: 'The Forum Exhibition of Modern
American Painters'. Stanton did some teaching
work, and had a solo exhibition in 1917, although
little sold.

In 1918, he left New York, and moved back home to
Los Angeles, California.

=== 3 Taking the Gospel of Modern Art to
California (1920 – 1925) ===

1: California lacketh modernism; 2: Stanton
bringeth the Testament of St. Pablo; 3–6:
Groups are formed and Synchromism codified.

California, and the rest of the USA's occidental
coast, was virtually untouched by modern art in
1918. Impressionism was still considered to be
pretty radical.

In 1920, Stanton began to experiment with film. He
created a full-length feature film, but it was
destroyed in a fire. In the same year, he
organised the first modern art exposition at 'The
Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art,
Exposition Park', entitled 'Exhibition of
Paintings by American Modernists'. He also gave
several lectures there, on modern art.

In 1923 he began teaching at the 'Los Angeles Art
Students League', where he had previously studied
before moving to Paris. He soon took over as
director, and held the post for ten years. He also
organised the 'First Exhibition of the Group of
Independent Artists of Los Angeles'; the Group of
Independent Artists of Los Angeles became an
important artistic group in the area.

In 1924 he wrote 'A Treatise on Color',
summarising the Synchromist method. This is
probably his most important literary work.

:"I have just gotten out a book on color, 60
copies with handmade charts of spectrums, which I
hope to sell at $10 each. This is in the hands of
God"
– Stanton in a letter to Morgan Russell

The next year, 1925, he organised the 'Modern Art
Workers'. This became another important artist
collective in California. He also organised
various exhibitions of modern art in the following
years.

=== 4 Development of Japanese Influences (1927
– 1973) ===

In 1927, the Los Angeles Museum hosted
'Synchromism', an exposition of Synchromist work.
Also, Stanton wrote and directed Synchromist
theatre in Santa Monica, using for the purpose a
device he invented to project colour. Both he and
Russell have been interested in making a kinetic
light machine since their Paris days; this is an
important first step (the project was finally
realised fully in 1959).

During the 1930s, he created an important mural
cycle for the Santa Monica Public Library, showing
art, science, and lots of great thinkers from
around the world and throughout time. He was also
involved in a number of exhibitions in New York
and California, and he became first district
supervisor, then later state director for a US
governmental art-related organisation ('Federal
Arts Project/ Works Project Administration'). He
repeatedly refers to this project as 'setting art
back 150 years' in the area. He also says:

:"My job on that thing was mostly talking to these
politicians and the people who were heads of
industries to get them to give ten percent of
putting up some statues or pictures that they
didn't need and didn't want, and I had to go
around and browbeat them and then I had—at
one time I had five secretaries there that were
writing letters here and there all of which was of
no possible importance one way or the other."
– Stanton, speaking in 1964

Also, in 1933, he wrote 'A Basis of Culture', a
survey of worldwide art (unpublished). He spent
1939 in a Zen Monastery.

In the 1940s, he had many major exhibitions, and
began teaching oriental and contemporary art at
UCLA (the University of California at Los
Angeles).

In 1951, his wife died. In 1952, he remarried, and
also travelled to Tokyo to study Chinese and
Japanese painting and sculpture, and also to do
some teaching in Tokyo, as a Fulbright professor.
He resigned from UCLA in 1954 due to ill health.
In 1956 there was a major retrospective of
Stanton's work. He says at the time:

:"At first I saw my new painting with a certain
astonishment, for I had made a great circle,
coming back after 35 years to an art that was,
superficially, not unlike the canvasses of my
youth. However, at bottom there was a great
difference. I had achieved an interior realism...
This is a sense of reality which cannot be seen
but which is evident by feeling."

After decades of attempts and failures, in 1959
Stanton built the first version of the Synchrome
Kineidoscope, the light machine about which he and
Russell had been theorising since 1913. Stanton's
brother Willard wrote a book about the machine
entitled 'The Future of Painting' (Stanton's copy
is dated 1923, he says it must be a reprint and he
thinks it was written in 1915).

In about 1960, Stanton was given a house in the
Kyoto monastery where he spent 1939. This suggests
that he was well-revered in Japan at this time. He
began to spend most of his time living there, in
the monastery. From that point all of his painting
was done in Japan.

:"We live in a monastery (my wife is the only
woman they ever allowed on the grounds); the house
that we live in is the same size, to the foot, as
this house that you're in now. ... it's oriented
in exactly the same direction; and it's divided in
exactly the same way as to rooms. Strange
coincidence, and that coincidence is the thing
that gave me that house. When the head bishop
found out about that thing, and several other
extraordinary coincidences, he became convinced
that I had lived there in times gone by.
interviewer interrupts So he handed me that house
for the duration of my life.

...

:It's the monastery the original foundation of Zen
in Japan; the original. That was founded by Eisai.
And this year ... marks the 750th anniversary of
the death of Eisai Zeshi. And Eisai's tomb is
within tossing distance of my studio: I mean I can
reach across to it with a fishing pole. That's
where I live."
– Stanton, talking in 1964

In 1962 he suffered a heart attack, but recovered.
In 1964 – 1965 he worked with Clif Karhu in
Tokyo on a series of 20 colour woodblock prints
entitled 'Haiga'.

In 1964, he was interviewed by a woman named Betty
Hoag. He talks about his life and the art world,
about Japanese and European influences and various
people. He talks a lot about the various murals
and things he did, or was involved in, in the
California area. Interestingly, he claims that his
painting is not influenced by oriental ideas:

Betty:   "Do you feel there is any Oriental
influence in your painting?"
Stanton: "Not a particle; absolutely not! Not a
hair's breadth!"

He goes on to explain:

:"...it's altogether something... I don't believe
it is possible for a Western mind to... Well,
let's put it this way: I'll quote Jung and say I
think it's very dangerous for a Western mind to
monkey with Oriental ideas. I don't think it
should be monkeyed-with at all."

This is presumably paraphrasing, rather than a
direct quote. And further:

:"Our minds don't work the way theirs do. Anybody
who has studied Japanese would realize the utter
difference between our method of thinking and what
the Japanese do."

Despite this, his figurative period used Japanese
forms and colours, and his later-life Synchromies,
with such titles as 'Flight of the Butterfly' and
'Subjective Time', have a subtle, flowing,
meditative feel to them which is undoubtedly
related to his contact with Zen philosophy and
art.

He probably means to say (above) that there is a
fundamental difference between true oriental works
and his own.

In 1973, he died of a heart attack, aged 83.

The material below needs merging:


Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890 - 1973), was a
United States of America|U.S. abstract painter.
One of his significant achievements was
co-founding the Synchronism|synchronist movement
in 1913.

MacDonald-Wright was born in Charlottesville,
Virginia and moved to Santa Monica, California at
age ten. He soon moved to Paris, France|Paris to
study at the Sorbonne, Académie Julian, École
des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Colarossi. While
there he and Morgan Russell developed
Synchronism|synchronism.

The artist exhibited in New York City, then
returned to Los Angeles, California in 1919. He
was a major force in the Los Angeles art scene for
the next several decades. He was the director of
the Southern California division of the federal
Works Project Administration from 1935 to 1942,
and personally completed several major civic art
projects, including the murals in Santa Monica
City Hall. 

After World War II, MacDonald-Wright became
interested in Japanese art and culture, which led
to the renewal of synchronism in his work. He
taught art for decades at University of
California, Los Angeles|UCLA and also had studios
in Kyoto, Japan and  Florence, Italy. 

==External links==
* http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/m/index.html#macdonald
Stanton MacDonald-Wright at CGFA