2000 Clifford 2000

Peggy Clifford Santa Monica's Wright Brothers: The Muralist and The Writer Santa Monica Mirror, 1 January 2000, 1 (29)

     "They were the other Wright brothers. Born in Virginia, they grew up in Santa Monica, where their father managed the Arcadia Hotel, and each brother forged an utterly idiosyncratic and distinguished life for himself, defying society and each other. 

   "The older brother built his literary career on his unalloyed scorn for Los Angeles, while the younger Wright secured his place in the art world when, after years in Paris and New York, he came home to Southern California to live and teach and make some of his most original and substantive work. 

  "The younger brother, Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973) attended Santa Monica High School and, while still a teenager, went to Paris to study art-first at the Sorbonne, later at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. With a colleague, Morgan Russell, he founded the Synchromist movement, the only American contribution to the European avant garde in the years before World War I. Synchromism has been described as "a style of near or complete abstraction, emphasizing effects of light through planes of color." 

   "The younger Wright was represented in the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913 and moved back to America in 1916. After several years in New York, he returned to Southern California, where he lived in Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, spending much time in Asia. In 1922, he was appointed director of the Art Students League of Los Angeles. In the 1930s, he directed the WPA Federal Arts Project in Southern California and, from 1942 to 1954, he taught Oriental Art and Aesthetics at UCLA, and went on to become a Fulbright exchange professor to Japan. From 1958 onward, he spent part of every year in a Zen monastery in Japan. 

   "His Santa Monica murals, though they occupied only a few years in a long, productive and various life, comprise a unique and significant portion of both his own oeuvre and the city's cultural heritage and resources. 

  "In the mid-1930s, Wright designed the murals in Santa Monica's City Hall and old Public Library, as well as painting the fire curtain mural and designing the tile mosaic in the lobby in Barnum Hall on the campus of Santa Monica High School . . . His work, Synchromy in Purple, is in the American Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

   "The house where Wright once lived on Eighteenth Street in Santa Monica also features some of his works. 

   "The City Hall murals are done in petrachrome, a process Wright developed which combines cement with crushed bits of marble, tile and granite. One of the City Hall murals depicts the arrival of the Spanish explorers in Southern California and the Mexican settlement. The other features such 1930s elements as sailboats, airplanes and road races, Two of the three library murals are stored in the Smithsonian Institution, while the third is on loan to the Santa Monica College library. 

     "Like the fire curtain mural, Landing of the Vikings in Vinland, the Barnum Hall lobby mosaic depicts the Vikings, the symbol of Samohi. Both of the works were done in 1937. 

     "Landing of the Vikings measures 20 x 40 feet and is painted on a primed asbestos curtain.

   "The older brother, Willard Huntington Wright (1888-1939) dropped out of Pomona College, was kicked out of Harvard for drinking absinthe in class and went abroad to study in Paris and Munich. At 22, he became the L.A. Times' literary critic and was promptly labeled "the boy iconoclast of Southern California" for his assaults on L.A. (i.e., "Hypocrisy, like a vast fungus, has spread over the city's surface"). In short order, he was named editor of New York's Smart Set. He also wrote several books of art criticism. Then, after a bout of drug addiction and a nervous breakdown, Wright literally reinvented himself. Under the pseudonym, S.S. Van Dine, he wrote a series of mysteries about a sophisticated, even effete Manhattan sleuth, modeled on himself, Philo Vance, who was featured in 27 motion pictures."

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017