At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism
May 7, 2022–Feb 26, 2023
Stanton Macdonald-Wright
10
Born 1890 in Charlottesville, VA
Died 1973 in Los Angeles, CA
Like many American artists during this time, Stanton Macdonald-Wright encountered modern art firsthand in Paris. By 1913, he had teamed up with Morgan Russell, a fellow American expat, to create a movement they called Synchromism, a conflation of “symphony” and “chroma.” As the name suggests, the two artists considered painting to be a synesthetic form of color-music that could induce emotional responses without the need for narrative or literal representation. Moreover, they used the spatial properties of color to create the impression of three-dimensionality on the two-dimensional canvas. At first, Macdonald-Wright’s Synchromist works were abstract compositions of pure color. Gradually, he began to introduce semi-abstract figurative imagery, as in this painting, whose twisting, three-dimensional forms he said represented a group of opium smokers. Like many Europeans and Americans at the time, the artist associated opium use with Asia and the Middle East, perhaps prompting the title Oriental - Synchromy in Blue-Green (which refers to a broad regional designation that is now considered dated).
Oriental - Synchromy in Blue-Green, 1918
Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Oriental - Synchromy in Blue-Green, 1918. Oil on linen, overall: 36 1/8 × 50 in. (91.8 × 127 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 52.8. © 2010 Macdonald-Wright Estate
Artists
- Richmond Barthé
- Ben Benn
- Albert Bloch
- Oscar Bluemner
- Patrick Henry Bruce
- Charles Burchfield
- Arthur B. Carles
- John Covert
- E.E. Cummings
- Imogen Cunningham
- James Daugherty
- Arthur B. Davies
- Stuart Davis
- Manierre Dawson
- Charles Demuth
- Isami Doi
- Aaron Douglas
- Arthur Dove
- Charles Duncan
- Yun Gee
- Marsden Hartley
- Rebecca Salsbury James
- Loïs Mailou Jones
- Taizo Kato
- Gaston Lachaise
- Blanche Lazzell
- Stanton Macdonald-Wright
- Man Ray
- John Marin
- Elie Nadelman
- Louise Nevelson
- Carl Newman
- Isamu Noguchi
- Chiura Obata
- Georgia O'Keeffe
- Walter Pach
- Agnes Pelton
- Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
- Henry Lyman Sayen
- Charles G. Shaw
- Harry Shigeta
- Henrietta Shore
- Pamela Colman Smith
- Joseph Stella
- Florine Stettheimer
- John Storrs
- Henry Fitch Taylor
- Helen Torr
- Jay Van Everen
- Adele Watson
- Max Weber
- Edith Clifford Williams
- Marguerite Zorach
- William Zorach