Morgan Russell
Morgan Russell
1886 - 1953
American painter. He was encouraged to paint by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (later his patron), who sponsored his first trip to Europe in 1906. Visiting Paris and Italy, he was impressed by Michelangelo’s sculpture, and upon his return he began studying sculpture with JAMES EARLE FRASER at the Art Students League, New York. After producing a small Post-Impressionist landscape in summer 1907, he studied painting with ROBERT HENRI and was influenced by Henri’s progressive attitude.
In spring 1908 Russell went to Paris, where he met Leo Stein and Gertrude Stein and, through them, Matisse and Picasso. He then joined the Académie Matisse, organized by Sarah Stein. In 1911 he began to study colour theory with the Canadian painter Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart (1873–1954). In his still-life paintings of 1912–13 he began to use colour harmonies rather than local colour, producing intensely coloured representational works that soon became more abstract, for example Synchromy in Yellow (1913; San Diego, CA, Mus. A.), which is clearly based on a still-life.
With Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Russell created SYNCHROMISM, an avant-garde style of colourful abstract painting. Seeking a spiritual exaltation equivalent to that produced by music, with which he also experimented, he combined abstract shape and colour in paintings such as Synchromy in Orange: To Form (1913–14; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.). At first his work had a basis in figurative art, particularly the sculpture of Michelangelo. When he and Macdonald-Wright exhibited together as Synchromists at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, Paris, in 1913, they attracted the attention of French critics, including Guillaume Apollinaire and Louis Vauxcelles. Russell’s Synchromies became more abstract until the figurative core became almost invisible, as in Four Part Synchromy, No. 7 (1914–15; New York, Whitney). By 1930 he had ceased to paint abstract works and begun to paint large-scale religious works. In 1946 he returned to the USA. [Gail Levin. "Russell, Morgan." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T074577.]
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