Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1990, 1913
" . . . Macdonald-Wright and Feitelson should share credit as the pioneering figures in California art . . . Macdonald-Wright's notion of color harmony, developed with Morgan Russell in Paris about 1913, actually had much in common with Symbolist correspondences between the arts (music and painting), not to mention the contemporary work of the Orphists and Futurists . . . after retuning to Los Angeles in 1919, Macdonald-Wright experimented with color wheels and a color machine, collaborating with ceramicist and movie special effects pioneer Albert King . . . " p. 29
Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973), 1990, 1913, 1912, 1910, 1907, 1904, 1900, 1890
"By 1910 his work had attained showcase stature and was accepted to the Salon d'Automne; two years later it gained entry into the prestigious Salon des Independents. Between the two shows, Macdonald-Wright befriended American artist Morgan Russell, with whom he developed a close working relationship. Together they investigated the serpentine rhythms of Michelangelo, the broken brushwork of the Impressionists, and the spatial plasticity of Cezanne. At the same time they responded to Matisse and Picasso, whose work they encountered at Gertrude Stein's salon. While absorbing the lessons of these masters they studied the color theories of Chevreul, Helmholtz and Rood and took classes from the Canadian colorist Percyval Tudor-Hart. The latter formulated a scheme of chromatic triads by which works could be keyed to a dominant chord. Additionally, he compared painting with music, relating, for instance, luminosity, saturation, and hue to musical pitch, volume, and tone.
"Convinced of color's preemptive importance, Russell and Macdonald-Wright developed a movement predicated on hue. Naming it Synchromism, meaning "with color," they introduced it in 1913 at Der Neue Kunstsalon in Munich and at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris.
"Like the contemporary Orphist movement with which it has been compared, Synchromism joined the fragmented forms of the Cubists with the brilliant hues of the Fauves. Importantly, however, it pushed the Fauve revolt further by liberating color from formal depiction. Freed from the burden of representation, color, in theory, could work independently as the prime agent of formal expression.
"To justify an art of pure color divorced from depiction, Russell and Macdonald-Wright invoked the example of music. Like Tudor-Hart, the Orphists, and Vasily Kandinsky, they allied the two arts metaphorically, pointing to their shared expressive and formal traits. In the catalogue for their 1913 Munich show, they argued that painting equaled music in its sublimity: "Mankind has until now always tried to satisfy its need for the highest spiritual exaltation only in music. Only tones have been able to grip us and transport us to the highest realms. Whenever man had a desire for heavenly intoxication, he turned to music. Yet color is just as capable as music of providing us with the highest ecstasies and delights."
[Note the similarities to Charles Seeger's analogies between language and music. KR]
"These high ambitions inspired the artists to exhibit their works in London, Milan, and Warsaw in 1913 and in New York the following year . . . "