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, 1918
Stanton Macdonald-Wright [1890-1973], 1990, 1918, 1916, 1913, 1912, 1910, 1907, 1904, 1900, 1890
". . . With the onset of the First World War, Macdonald-Wright fled to London where he roomed with his brother Willard Huntington Wright, an editor for Smart Set magazine, whom he assisted in writing books on art. In 1916 he sailed to New York where he mingled in vanguard circles and participated in The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters. Subsequent shows at progressive New York galleries, including Alfred Stieglitz's 291, served to secure his East Coast reputation.
"The artist, however, despite his success, felt uneasy with life in Manhattan. Thus, he left New York in 1918 and returned to Southern California. Inspired by the mountains and valleys surrounding his home, he trained his pictorial gaze on the verdant outdoors. In the process, he lightened his palette with streaks of white that invoked Santa Monica's damp coastal air.
"In his California Synchromies, Macdonald-Wright brings his early discoveries to a state of perfection. Now, as before, color determines structure and obliges other elements to submit to its control. Operating as a spatial force, it grants forms plasticity. As the artist observed: "Form to me is color . . . I conceive space itself as of a plastic significance that I express in color. Form not being simply the mass of each object seen separately, I organize my canvas as a solid block as much in depth as laterally."
"Clearly, color and form in these Synchromies function synergistically to yield an interwoven field in the mode of the late Cezanne. Luminous hues, harmonically grouped, give the impression of tiny, bright rainbows adrift in a moist atmosphere. . . .
" . . . [These paintings] sustain a light, impalpable air. Blithely, they accurately capture a sense of place-of gullies and bluffs sheathed in soft haze, of villas stacked on palisades overlooking cool bays. Gauzy white patches powder the fields to evoke Santa Monica's ambient fog. The manner in which they blanket the forms recalls the Oriental landscape painting which the artist admired. The gaps that they create on the surface thus might be read, not a negative voids, but as resonant regions of light in accord with their Eastern models."