Morgan Russell

Morgan Russell
self-portrait c. 1907
Born	(1886-01-25)January 25, 1886 New York City
Died	May 29, 1953(1953-05-29) (aged 67)
Nationality	American
Known for	Painting
Movement	Synchromism

Morgan Russell (January 25, 1886 – May 29, 1953) was a modern American artist. With Stanton Macdonald-Wright, he was the founder of Synchromism, a provocative style of abstract painting that dates from 1912 to the 1920s. Russell's "synchromies," which analogized color to music, were an early American contribution to the rise of Modernism.

Biography

Russell was born and raised in New York City. He initially studied architecture and, after 1903, became friendly with the sculptor

In Paris, Russell met

Salon des Indépendants

in 1913.

Synchromism was an early innovation in pure abstraction, which was developed primarily by Russell with contributions from Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Other American painters in Paris experimenting with Synchromism at the time included Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Dasburg, and Patrick Henry Bruce, all of whom were friends with Russell and Macdonald-Wright. Bruce was also friendly with Sonia and Robert Delaunay, proponents of Orphism (a term coined in 1912 by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire). Similarities between Synchromism and Orphism led to later charges of plagiarism, which both Russell and Macdonald-Wright vehemently denied.^[3]

Russell and Macdonald-Wright had high hopes for acclaim and financial success when they introduced Synchromism to the New York art world. Though Russell exhibited in the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913 and in the prestigious Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters in 1916, those hopes were never met. Art collectors, critics, and curators prior to World War I were reluctant to embrace color abstraction and, on the rare occasions when they were open to radical new styles of art, preferred the European modernism attached to names with greater cachet.

The first sympathetic, extended treatment of Synchromism appeared in the book Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning, published in 1915 by Macdonald-Wright's brother,

.

By 1920, Russell and Macdonald-Wright had gone their separate ways, though Macdonald-Wright continued to make efforts at selling his friend's work throughout the 1920s.[5] Macdonald-Wright moved back to his native California and established a successful niche for himself as a charismatic figure in the Los Angeles art world. Russell, who was a cross-dresser (though married twice), never ceased painting, either, but he experienced financial difficulties and lapsed into relative obscurity. Synchromism was seldom discussed in art-history textbooks and was not the subject of any major exhibitions before the late 1950s. Gallery exhibitions of Russell's work were infrequent. After spending almost four decades in France between 1909 and 1946, Russell retired to the United States after the war and converted to Catholicism in 1947. His painting in his later years, often of nudes, was largely figurative and displayed none of the color effects he had pioneered with Synchromism. After suffering two incapacitating strokes, he died aged 67 in a nursing home in a suburb of Philadelphia in 1953.

Gradually, during the last three decades of the twentieth century, long-overdue scholarly and public attention was paid to Synchromism. The

in Buffalo, was one of the centerpieces of the 2013 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925."

References

Sources

• Davidson, Abraham A. (1994). Early American Modernist Painting, 1910–1935. New York: DaCapo.
• Knopf
  .
• Kushner, Marilyn (1990). Morgan Russell. New York: Hudson Hills.
• Levin, Gail (1978). Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925. New York: George Braziller.
• Loughery, John (1995). Alias S.S. Van Dine. New York: Henry Holt.
• South, Will (2001). Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism. Raleigh, North Carolina: North Carolina Museum of Art.
• Synchromism: Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries. 1999.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Morgan Russell.

• The Jean Gabriel Lemoine papers relating to Morgan Russell, 1921–1923 at the Archives of American Art are an archival collection consisting largely of letters and letter fragments written by Morgan Russell to Jean Gabriel Lemoine, art critic for L'Echo de Paris. In these letters Russell explains his art and the Synchromist style that he developed with Stanton MacDonald-Wright.
• Kushner, Marilyn S. "The Early Years, 1886–1906". Montclair Art Museum. Retrieved July 24, 2022 – via Traditional Fine Arts Organization.
• Kramer, Hilton (March 22, 1998). "Morgan Russell's Fine Art: Thank You, Michelangelo!". The New York Observer. Archived from the original on March 2, 2011. Retrieved July 24, 2022.
• Galligan, Gregory (2006). "The Morgan Russell Archives" (PDF). American Art Review. Vol. XVIII, no. 4. pp. 140–145. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 5, 2007. Retrieved July 24, 2022.
• Montclair Art Museum (2006). "Morgan Russell and the Old Masters". Retrieved July 24, 2022 – via Traditional Fine Arts Organization.