in Interlingua

Development of Japanese Influences (1927–1973)

In 1927, the Los Angeles Museum hosted ‘Synchronism’, an exposition of Synchronist work. Also, Stanton wrote and directed Synchronist theatre in Santa Monica, using for the purpose a device he invented to project colour. Both he and Russel have been interested in making a kinetic light machine since their Paris days; this is an important first step (the project was finally realised fully in 1959).

During the 1930s, he created an important mural cycle for the Santa Monica Public Library, showing art, science, and lots of great thinkers from around the world and throughout time. He was also involved in a number of exhibitions in New York and California, and he became first district supervisor, then later state director for a US governmental art-related organisation (‘Federal Arts Project/ Works Project Administration’). He repeatedly refers to this project as ‘setting art back 150 years’ in the area. He also says:

«My job on that thing was mostly talking to these politicians and the people who were heads of industries to get them to give ten percent of putting up some statues or pictures that they didn’t need and didn’t want, and I had to go around and browbeat them and then I had — at one time I had five secretaries there that were writing letters here and there all of which was of no possible importance one way or the other.»

— Stanton, speaking in 1964

Also, in 1933, he wrote ‘A Basis of Culture’, a survey of worldwide art (unpublished). He spent 1939 in a Zen Monastry.

In the 1940s, he had many major exhibitions, and began teaching oriental and contemporary art at UCLA (the University of California at Los Angeles).

In 1951, his wife died. In 1952, he remarried, and also travelled to Tokyo to study Chinese and Japanese painting and sculpture, and also to do some teaching in Tokyo, as a Fulbright professor. He resigned from UCLA in 1954 due to ill health. In 1956 there was a major retrospective of Stanton’s work. He says at the time:

«At first I saw my new painting with a certain astonishment, for I had made a great circle, coming back after 35 years to an art that was, superficially, not unlike the canvasses of my youth. However, at bottom there was a great difference. I had achieved an interior realism... This is a sense of reality which cannot be seen but which is evident by feeling.»
After decades of attempts and failures, in 1959 Stanton built the first version of the Synchrome Kineidoscope, the light machine about which he and Russel had been theorising since 1913. Stanton’s brother Willard wrote a book about the machine entitled ‘The Future of Painting’ (Stanton’s copy is dated 1923, he says it must be a reprint and he thinks it was written in 1915).

In about 1960, Stanton was given a house in the Kyoto monastry where he spent 1939. This suggests that he was well-revered in Japan at this time. He began to spend most of his time living there, in the monastry. From that point all of his painting was done in Japan.

«We live in a monastery (my wife is the only woman they ever allowed on the grounds); the house that we live in is the same size, to the foot, as this house that you’re in now. [...] it’s oriented in exactly the same direction; and it’s divided in exactly the same way as to rooms. Strange coincidence, and that coincidence is the thing that gave me that house. When the head bishop found out about that thing, and several other extraordinary coincidences, he became convinced that I had lived there in times gone by. [interviewer interrupts] So he handed me that house for the duration of my life.

[...]

It’s [the monastry] the original foundation of Zen in Japan; the original. That was founded by Eisai. And this year [...] marks the 750th anniversary of the death of Eisai Zeshi. And Eisai’s tomb is within tossing distance of my studio: I mean I can reach across to it with a fishing pole. That’s where I live.»

— Stanton, talking in 1964

In 1962 he suffered a heart attack, but recovered. In 1964-1965 he worked with Clif Karhu in Tokyo on a series of 20 colour woodblock prints entitled ‘Haiga’.

In 1964, he was interviewed by a woman named Betty Hoag. He talks about his life and the art world, about Japanese and European influences and various people. He talks a lot about the various murals and things he did, or was involved in, in the California area. Interestingly, he claims that his painting is not influenced by oriental ideas:

Betty: «Do you feel there is any Oriental influence in your painting?»
Stanton: «Not a particle; absolutely not! Not a hair’s breadth!»
He goes on to explain:

«...it’s altogether something... I don’t believe it is possible for a Western mind to... Well, let’s put it this way: I’ll quote Jung and say I think it’s very dangerous for a Western mind to monkey with Oriental ideas. I don’t think it should be monkeyed-with at all.»
This is presumably paraphrasing, rather than a direct quote. And further, probably with implicit reference to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (i.e. that language controls what we think about and how we think about it):

«Our minds don’t work the way theirs do. Anybody who has studied Japanese would realize the utter difference between our method of thinking and what the Japanese do.»
Despite this, his figurative period used Japanese forms and colours, and his later-life Synchromies, with such titles as ‘Flight of the Butterfly’ and ‘Subjective Time’, have a subtle, flowing, meditative feel to them which is undoubtably related to his contact with Zen philosophy and art.

He probably means to say (above) that there is a fundamental difference between true oriental works and his own.

In 1973, he died of a heart attack, aged 83.

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