Stanton Macdonald-Wright was born 1890, in Chalottesville, Virginia, USA. His father was an amateur painter, and encouraged the young Stanton’s interest in art. When Stanton was 10 years old, the family moved to Santa Monica, California. Resisting his family’s pressure to aim for a career in medicine, Stanton attempted (unsuccessfully) to run away to Japan, and (successfully) to study Art in Los Angeles.
In 1907, aged seventeen and married (last year) to a well-off woman of 27 years, he went to Paris, to enjoy the bohemian life of the avant garde artist (though without the usually associated poverty). He later says ‘I felt at home in European traditions because, [...] I [had] had to speak French always at dinner and Spanish at lunch, so I was really trilingual as a kid’. He also studied at various art institutions, including the Sorbonne, where he met Henri Focillion, who introduced him to oriental art and philosophy.
«I became interested in Oriental art through probably the greatest aesthetician with whom I studied at the Sorbonne, in Paris, when I was a very young man over there. His name was Focillon. He is the man who is recognized, I guess all over the world, as being the greatest aesthetician of modern times; he is a very sweet fellow. And he said to me one day, ‘I know nothing about Oriental art, but I think there is a great deal in it’.»It is worth noting that 1907 is the year Picasso painted ‘Les Damoiselles d’Avignon’, the painting considered to signify the birth of modern art. Stanton collected art, including works by Cèzanne, by whom he was (like everyone else, it must be said) heavily influenced.— Stanton, speaking in 1964
«Every modern painting that existed, from the time of Cèzanne, was influenced by Cèzanne. Cèzanne was a great spring, out of which many of those boys [= men like Othon Friesz] would take a cupful; but the spring was still there, gushing. And without Cèzanne there never would have been any devolvement of modern painting.»In 1911, he visited London, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Antwerp and Brussels. He met Morgan Russel, another US expatriate. Russel took him to the atelier of Percyval Tudor-Harte, an English colour-theorist and painter (and, acording to Stanton ‘perfectly stark-raving mad’). The two studied and worked with Tudor-Harte, and studied colour-theory profoundly.— Stanton, speaking in 1964
Stanton and Russel attended the various soirées of Gertrude and Leo Stein, where Stanton met Picasso, Rodin, and Matisse. He also knew Man Ray and many other now-famous artists in Paris at that time.
In 1912, when Vorticism was coming of age in England, and Cubism was in its most productive phase, Stanton and Russel founded Synchronism, an abstract offshoot of cubism that considered colour to be the raw material of art. It closely resembles the Orphism practiced by Robert Delauney at the same time. This seems to have been pointed out before, and Stanton rebukes:
«It has nothing to do with Orphism and anybody who has read the first catalogue of Synchromism of the Bernheim Jeune exhibition of 1913, or of the Nue Kunst Salon Exhibition in Munich of the same year would realize that we poked fun at Orphism and at Delaunay in spite of the fact the Delaunay was a good friend of mine. [...] The reason we were likened to it [Orphism] is because we were the first people to break away from the monochromatic type of work that was done by Cubism at that time.Like Kandinsky, Vorticism, and other then-contemporary abstract artists and movements, Synchomism explained itself in terms of music. Synchronist paintings were called ‘Synchronies’, a word which closely resembles ‘Symphonies’.[he moves on to the similarities]
They [Synchronism and Orphism] were both color. Delaunay had a very delicate sense of color, a very charming sense of color. Delaunay was probably right in the French tradition of its most magnificent decorative quality, just as Braque was afterward.»
— Stanton, speaking in 1964
«These two artists believed that color had sound equivalents, and the word synchrony means ‘with color’ the way symphony means ‘with sound’. They believed that by painting in color scales in the same way that one composes with musical scales, you could create paintings that would evoke in the viewer musical sensations. Europeans at that time knew about these theories and were riled up [= excited] about them.»— Will South, Curator, ‘Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism’
