Stanton Macdonald-Wright
Stanton Macdonald-Wright
1890 - 1973
American painter. He was brought up in Santa Monica, CA, and first studied art from 1904 to 1905 at the Art Students League, New York, under Warren T. Hedges (1883–1910). In 1907 he went to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne (1908–12), also studying briefly at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Académie Colarossi and Académie Julian. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon d’Automne in 1910.
In 1911 Macdonald-Wright met Morgan Russell and they studied under Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart (1873–1954), a Canadian painter, whose colour theory was analogous to that of musical harmonies. Macdonald-Wright and Russell collaborated on developing their own theory of colour abstraction, which they called SYNCHROMISM; its emphasis lay in colour rhythms. Synchromist paintings, such as Abstraction on Spectrum (Organization No. 5) (1914; Des Moines, IA, A. Cent.), often had a superficial resemblance to the Orphist works of Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay; both Synchromism and Orphism, however, had their roots in Cubism. Unlike the Orphist concern for coloured light, Synchromism used colour to convey the three-dimensionality of objects. The different parts of Macdonald-Wright’s paintings were not meant to be perceived simultaneously, but through the development of colour rhythms.
Macdonald-Wright first exhibited his Synchromist works with Russell at the Neue Kunstsalon, Munich, in 1913, and then at Bernheim-Jeune, Paris; they exhibited in New York at the Carroll Galleries in 1914. The compositions of his earlier Synchromies were based on the human figure and often used the contrapposto pose of Michelangelo’s sculpture as a major design element. He experimented with pure abstraction only briefly c. 1914, preferring to find inspiration in landscapes, still-lifes and, in works such as Synchromy in Blue (1916; New York, Weyhe Gal.), in the human figure. From 1916 to 1919 he worked in New York, contributing to the landmark Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters (1916), and he had his first one-man exhibition in New York at Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, in 1917.
In 1919 Macdonald-Wright returned to California and was based in Los Angeles for the rest of his life. From 1922 he directed the Art Students League of Los Angeles. At that time his art was less Cubist and more representational, although he retained a preference for heroic figures, prismatic hues and crystalline planes. From 1935 to 1937 he directed the Southern California region of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) and later served as technical adviser for the Western region of the FAP. In the latter position he was influential in encouraging the revival of mosaic murals in Southern California, particularly the invention of new, inexpensive mural techniques such as petrachrome; this new mosaic process used tinted concrete as opposed to pieces of glass embedded in concrete, as in the ancient opus sectile method. He also received several mural commissions, including one for 38 panels on the theme ‘Invention and Imagination’ for the Santa Monica Public Library (1934–5; on dep. Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.).
Macdonald-Wright became increasingly involved with Zen and oriental art, in which he found a source for creating a more serene and transcendent vision. By the 1930s his themes were inspired by oriental legends and philosophies. He first visited Japan in 1937, and from 1956 he began spending five months each year at a Zen monastery in Kyoto. In the 1940s he painted Synthetic Cubist works, but following Russell’s death he returned to Synchromist paintings. During the 1950s there was renewed interest in his art. From 1942 he taught oriental philosophy as well as art history at the University of California in Los Angeles. His last significant work was the Haigo folio, a series of 20 woodblock prints illustrating haiku poems (1965–6; unpublished). [Ilene Susan Fort. " Macdonald-Wright, Stanton." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T052762.]
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