Synchromism
Synchromism was an
Theory and style
Synchromism is based on the idea that
The
The earliest Synchromist works were similar to Fauvist paintings. The multi-colored shapes of Synchromist paintings also loosely resembled those found in the Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay.[5] Macdonald-Wright insisted, however, that Synchromism was a unique art form and "has nothing to do with Orphism and anybody who has read the first catalogue of Synchromism ... would realize that we poked fun at Orphism." The Synchromists' debts to Orphism remain a source of debate among art historians. Their approach more clearly owed something to Cubism. The Synchromists made use of the broken planes of the Cubists, but their lavishly colored areas of paint sometimes looked, as the art historian Abraham Davidson has described them, like "eddies of mist, the droplets of which collect to form parts of a straining torso....To find anything like this in American painting one has to wait for the color-field canvases of Jules Olitski in the 1960s."[6]
History
Synchromism was developed by Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell while they were studying in Paris during the early 1910s.
The first Synchromist painting, Russell's Synchromy in Green, exhibited at the
The earliest extended discussion of Synchromism appeared in the book Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning (1915) by Willard Huntington Wright. Wright was a literary editor and art critic and the brother of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and the book was secretly co-authored by Stanton. It surveyed the major modern art movements from Manet to Cubism, praised the work of Cézanne (at the time relatively unknown in the United States), denigrated "lesser Moderns" such as Kandinsky and the Futurists (and, of course, the Orphists), and predicted a coming age in which color abstraction would supplant representational art. Synchromism is presented in the book as the culminating point in the evolution of modernism. Willard Huntington Wright never acknowledged that he was writing about his own brother's work.[16]
Three other extended treatments of Synchromism can be found in the catalogue by Gail Levin that accompanied a major traveling exhibition organized the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978, Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925, in Marilyn Kushner's catalogue for a 1990 Morgan Russell retrospective at the Montclair Museum, and in Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism by Will South, a catalogue-biography published in conjunction with a three-museum exhibition of the artist's work in 2001. Levin and South are the two art historians most responsible for attracting scholarly and public attention to Synchromism, a movement that has often occupied a minor place in twentieth-century art-history textbooks.
Notes
- ISBN 0-8109-1811-0.
- ^ Hughes, p. 345.
- ^ "Stanton Macdonald-Wright: Modern Synchromism". artnet—The Art World Online. Artnet Worldwide Corporation, New York, NY, USA. Retrieved 10 September 2012.
- ^ Miyasemervekaplan. "Art Movements: Synchronism". Art Movements. Retrieved 2017-05-25.
- ^ Hughes, p. 348 and South, pp. 43, 55–56.
- ^ Davidson, p. 124.
- ^ Will South's Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism is the principal book-length study of the movement and its history.
- ^ "Synchromism | art movement". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2017-05-24.
- ^ South, pp. 30–35.
- ^ South, p. 21.
- ^ "Synchromism: Abstract Painting Style". www.visual-arts-cork.com. Retrieved 2017-05-24.
- ^ South, p. 43.
- ^ Roberts, p. 94.
- ^ Roberts, p. 94.
- ^ Donald T. Ryan, Jr., Albert Henry Khrebiel (1873–1945): American Impressionist, Muralist, and Art Educatior (Krehbiel Corporation, 2001).
- ^ Loughery, pp. 94–97.
Sources
- Brown, Milton. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.
- Davidson, Abraham A. Early American Modernist Painting, 1910–1935. New York: DaCapo, 1994.
- Kushner, Marilyn. Morgan Russell. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990.
- Hughes, Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. New York: Knopf, 1997.
- Hunter, Sam. Modern American Painting and Sculpture. New York: Dell, 1959.
- Levin, Gail. Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925. New York: George Braziller, 1978.
- Loughery, John. Alias S.S. Van Dine. New York: Scribners, 1992.
- South, Will. Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism. Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001.
- Synchromism: Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1999.
- Wright, Willard Huntington Wright. Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning. New York: John Lane & Co., 1915.