Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, LACMA Press Release 2001August 5 through October 28, 2001, 1973
Macdonald-Wright in California
"Disappointed with the New York art scene and detesting the city, Macdonald-Wright returned to Los Angeles in 1918 and immediately plunged into a wide variety of projects that challenged a local art community still under the spell of Impressionism. Though he was literally penniless, in the midst of a divorce and overcoming an opium addiction, he quickly established himself as the foremost modernist in the region and, more than anyone, encouraged the development of a distinctively West Coast response to modernism.
"He taught at the Chouinard School of Art (now the California Institute of the Arts), directed the Art Students League of Los Angeles, lectured and published his ideas on art, aesthetics and philosophy, and eventually taught at UCLA. He is also credited with organizing the first exhibition of modern art in Southern California, the 1920 Exhibition of American Modernists at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art (the forerunner of LACMA). Throughout his life, Macdonald-Wright was one of the foremost advocates of modern art on the West Coast, organizing numerous shows of his work and that of other progressive artists.
"Macdonald-Wright's painting in Southern California reflected new influences and aspirations. Central to his work was his increasing absorption in all things Asian. In addition to his study of Buddhist and Taoist philosophies, he continued his Chinese studies, frequented Chinatown, and attended traditional Chinese theater. Inspired by Eastern art and thought, Macdonald-Wright's work was now characterized by more subtle and elegant compositions. His landscapes, based on California's many hills and valleys, were rendered in the delicate style of Chinese scroll painting and his still lifes featured formal simplicity and identifiably Asian motifs.
"He maintained that East and West were equal halves of an as yet unrealized whole, and that a harmonious union could only be achieved through the marriage of Western logic and technology to Eastern philosophy and imagination. He not only tirelessly expounded on the inevitable unity of the two cultures, but also attempted to fuse Eastern and Western elements in his own work. One of his most successful examples is Yin Synchromy, No. 3 (1930) that depicts an idealized nude female figure (based on Michelangelo's Creation of Adam and Eve in the Sistine Chapel) floating within an evanescent mountainscape reminiscent of Japan."
"L.A art critic Merle Armitage described Macdonald-Wright as "a formidable man." Distinguished director/writer John Huston, a most formidable man himself, once said, "S. Macdonald-Wright furnished the foundation of whatever education I have."