Stanton Macdonald-Wright A Retrospective Exhibition 1911-1970, The UCLA Art Galleries/The Grünwald Graphic Arts Foundation, Nov. 16 through Dec. 20, 1970.
[Inside Cover] Stanton MacDonald-Wright
The UCLA Art Galleries are happy to present this retrospective of the work of Stanton MacDonald-Wright. We salute him as a major figure and pioneer in the art of the Twentieth Century, a painter who enjoys an international renown. The Grünwald Graphic Arts Foundation joins us in this comprehensive presentation.
Time was when Stanton MacDonald-Wright taught on the staff of Pictorial Arts at UCLA. This exhibition celebrates his eightieth year-a fact his friends find difficult to realize. The selection of the one-hundred and seventeen paintings, drawings and prints, the installation of the exhibition, are equally his own: this is his exhibition, and we would not wish it otherwise.
Here we would like to express our gratitude to the many collectors and institutions whose generosity has made this exhibition possible: Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Allen; Mrs. Paul Blanchard; Miss Marguerite Beatrice Child; Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Davis; Mr. and Mrs. Lorser Feitelson; Lynne M. and Lewis P. Geyser; Mr. Edward Goldfield; Mr. and Mrs. Gerald P. Goldfield; Mr. and Mrs. M.A. Gribin; Mr. Joseph H. Hazen; Dr. and Mrs. Jagendorf; Dr. and Mrs. Vern O. Knudsen; Mrs. Jacquelyn M. Littlefield; Dr. and Mrs. Barnett Malbin; Mr. and Mrs. Edgar B. Miller; Dr. David L. Nellis; Mr. Roy R. Neuberger; Dr. and Mrs. Joseph H. Pollock; Mrs. Lenore C. Ross; Mrs. Bee Sands; Mr. and Mrs. Jan Stussy; Anne and John Summerfield; Mr. and Mrs. Albert H. Sutton; Dr. and Mrs. Herman Weiner; Mrs. Hugh Edward Wilson; Des Moines Art Center (Nathan Emory Memorial Collection); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Museum Purchase); The Museum of Modern Art, New York; (Anonymous Gift); The Michener Collection, The University of Texas; National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (Gift of George F. Of); La Tortue Galerie; Edyth Polster.
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Frederick Wight Stanton Macdonald-Wright InterviewedStanton Macdonald-Wright A Retrospective Exhibition 1911-1970, The UCLA Art Galleries/The Grünwald Graphic Arts Foundation, Nov. 16 through Dec. 20, 1970.
W: I think we should begin with the subject of Synchromy-perhaps with the origins of the name or word.
M-W: Synchromy is a word that Morgan Russell and I invented. It is to color what symphony is to sound, it means everything is done with color. Synchromy was launched in 1913.
W: How long had you been in Paris at that time?
M-W: I'd been to Paris for perhaps, I'm not quite sure, I think I went over-it was either 1906 or 7.
W: Did you know any of the Americans who were on the scene then? Marin was around in those years.
M-W: I never knew Marin until I got back to New York with Steiglitz.
W: And Weber was around-
M-W: I met Weber only in New York.
W: How long had you known Delaunay?
M-W: Well, I knew Delaunay probably for four or five years. I never had been to his studio in my life, and the only picture I ever saw of Delauney in those days-the one that I admired most-was the picture called Ville de Paris which was in the 1912 or 13 Salon des Independents. I 'm a great admirer of that picture. I'm an admirer of his paintings. I'm not an admirer of the last things he did but I am an admireer of what he did before, I think he was one of the great men of the European Movement.
W: He is still perhaps underestimated-when did you come back from Paris?
M-W: I came back twice. I came back to repatriate myselt in 1914 and I went back to Paris after being in New York again in 1916.
W: You knew Matisse at one point?
M-W Yes. That was fairly early, when I went to Paris. I knew him best after our show in 1913 but I had known him for a couple of years befoere then at the same time I knew Rodin.
W: You speak of "our" show. That's your show with Morgan Russell?
M-W: Yes, at Bernheim Jeune. We exhibited at first in Munich, that was in 1913 in June at the old, what was the name of that gallery?-that was the founding of Synchromy. We only went there in the way that theatrical companies go out of town for a tryout.
W: To see what you thought of it?
M-W: Yes. Well, the Germans had such a wonderful time with that thing. They took all the posters down. Every kiosk in Munich had a poster and we had had those things printed. Russell and I went to work and put just a splash of color up under "Synchromy," and the painters liked them so much they went and took them off every kiosk. We had to sit down in a terrible heat, I think it was June in Munich, and paint the damn things all over again It was called the Neue Kunst Salon at the old Pranner Strasser in Munich. I don't know whether it still exists or not-
W: You came home and you were painting in this Synchromy that stayed with you for a number of years-
M-W: Well, it stayed with me while I was in New York but as soon as I came out to California-I had a look at it myself and I saw that Russell and I had established a sort of academicism which was-while different-nevertheless just as much an academicism as anything else, I mean as the old French 19th Century thing of the Ecole des Beaux Art. I didn't like what was going on in the way of art at all and I simply retired from the exhibiion field for thirty-five years.
W: But you were painting all the same-
M-W: I never stopped painting, Fred, even when I was working in your salt mines. I tried to resign from your Department at that time. I had four lectures a week and I got them all in one day. Then that would give six days that I could paint, but when I came back here after that day, I said, my God, this will be wonderful, I've got six days to work, and then I began to think, but you've got to go back at the end of six day and I couldn't do anything, so at the end of '54 I just resigned,
W: Well now, let's talk about what came out of you during that period when you detached yourself from what was going on in New York, or what was going on generally. I don't like to see that lost to sight, particularly in this exhibition.
M-W: In order to do that, Fred, let me explain that I thought I should research everything that had been done, because after all today we're all the inheritors of this entire world of art of ours. So I began to study what I was interested in, [p. unnumbered b] particularly from almost an Oriental standpoint. I had been put into that (Oriental Art) by Focillon with whom I studied at the Sorbonne. I began the actual study of Chinese art and the Chinese language because I thought it was necessary to do my own researching in the native language. I don't put much faith in too many translations. And I begin with that. I think one thing that you are going to get, Chinese Ceramic, will give you an idea of some of the things which interested me in the Chinese. Particularly I was interested then in the establishment of black and white balancing. That (interest) led me into Persian art, and I went into that pretty thoroughly. As a matter of fact, I went out and bought two or three Persian miniatures and I'm glad I did-I have them still-and from that I went back to the early-say the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe in the beginning or the inception, as it were, of the Renaissance. I even went back one to Italy to study the pictures that had been made in what they call the House of Mystery in Pompeii which to me was the basis of all that Renaissance work.
W: They are very beautiful things.
M-W: They're beautiful things, yes, they are and magnificently done and if you look at them closely you will find that-I know Titian never saw them or the Venetian school-but the handling of the human figure in there is vastly like the Venetians.
W: It has a Renaissance look.
M-W: Oh it has, it has, doesn't it. Well, if those things kept me occupied for this period of years when I tried this and I tried that and then finally I found out that none of these things pleased me when I did them, although they all pleased me when I saw them. So I began trying to figure out the thing that did please me and at the end of that time, about 1954, I found out that I had made, as it were, the great circle. I'd come back to what I'd brought back to America from Paris which was Synchromism. But I think it had something added to it.
W: Understandably.
M-W: That's really what I did for thirty-five years or more, and during that time, of course, I had no way of making a living. I had not exhibited except, I think once in 1930 or 31 at Steiglitz,' An American Place, and I remember that when Russell was over here at approximately the same time he wanted to exhibit and we showed together in the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and then we had another exhibition in Stendahl's but outside of that I never exhibited at all.
W: No this was the time when your involvement with Japan was getting under way.
M-W: Yes, yes. When I was working for the government which I did in 1935. I had a lot of fancy titles but no raise in salary for it. I was supposed to take care of seven western states on WPA. I stood it as long as I could and after two years I told them that I had to resign and I went to Japan for a year. I had studied Zen since before I left Paris, as a matter of fact, and had kept it up more or less. And I went there one might say as a visiting priest. When I walked around Japan at that time I thought it would be a good place to die. The doctor who had sent me back there had said, "You'll never get back here again." He siad, "You've got several symptoms of lethal diseases, not with enough symptoms to let me state definitely what it is but go over there and they'll bring you back in a box " And then he said, "That would be nicer for your wife and your mother who seem to like you, God knows why, I don't know." I agreed with him so I got on a Japanese freighter at San Pedro, [see above] which broke down the second day and we limped across the entire Pacific-it took us about thirty days or more to get over there. I was in Japan at that time for approximately a year and it seemd like home to me. I had become thoroughly interested in Oriental art, more than anything else, and especially in Persian art. But all the same I was raised in an absolutely Western classical tradition. I had got that from my father. I had, I thought, sloughed off all of that (classical) part of me. But I find I haven't, I'm just as classical now as I ever was. But at that time I wished to get away from the exterior aspects of Classicism and I found that I had come back to what I had brought back from Paris with me.
W: But now what did you feel that Japan did for you, because you have something that seems to run very deep in the way of a relationship with the Orient.
M-W: I do have it but strangely enough I don't think I can verbalize it. I think primarily what Japan did for me was to give me an insight into antiquity. Not our antiquity from the West or not so much their antiquity specifically. But as I had studied Chinese art for a good many years, by that time probably twenty-five to thirty years, I found a great deal that was Chinese there, found a great deal that I'd liked, I found that part of painting which we unfortunately haven't got too much of in the West.
[p. c]
W: Speaking of Eastern influence, tell me, Stan, did you have any special interest in Gauguin? An Oriental involvement in a Western artist suggest Gauguin, and something of your absorption with color suggests it to me, too.
M-W: Fred, the only connection that I ever had with Gauguin was that I used to use one of his negress (models) who was a mistress of his in Paris, the one who deserted him at Le Pouldu. Gauguin had a decorative element, and I never handled a decorative element except supplementarily one might say. My idea was the establishment of form by means of color. Gauguin was not interested in form. Not at all. Neither was Matisse, I had long talks with Matisse about composition and about form. He said, "I know nothing about composition. I know nothing about drawing. I simply put down what I like to do, and I like color." I think that Matisse had one of the most exquisite eyes for color that we've ever had in painting.
W: Tell me, in your paintings-because you certainly are a colorist-does the color come first, do you start thinking of relationships in color when a painting is coming on? For that matter, do you simply walk into the canvas or do you make plans?
M-W: Well, I'll tell you. This will sound perhaps a bit cockeyed to you for the reason that there are two things that happen at the same time. And people think that they can't think of two things at once but I think they do, I think we all do. What I do in painting is a very simple thing. The color, as you say, is the primary element, that 's theprima materia. One color put down demands another color and the shape of the color I put on demands another specific shape. If I put down the thirty-sixth color in a relationship I may have to go back and change four or five of those others to make a sequence of color going from one side to the other, that is a destination. What does this look like, what does it mean?-because to me painting has got to have some significance. Otherwise, it would be simply a matter of nice surface decoration which I don't have any interest in. I like color. I like to look at a kaleidoscope, but if it doesn't mean anything to me, it doesn't mean anything, tha's all. Take a picture, for instance,Plane Take-Off. When I began painting that thing I put in certain directional aspects, compositional aspects. Then I start with the color, and what that means to me is anessor, or a growth, or a croissance that may suggest a plane take-off or something of that kind. Then I think I'm influenced to perhaps bend some of those things to convey a certain idea like that.
W: From what you've toild me you get a structure going on the canvas before the color comes on in.
M-W: No, no, it's with the color, the structure is with the color altogether. No.
W: I don't think I've seen a painting of your's that doesn't have a strong blue note. I'm struck by the blue side of the spectrum. I see, of course, that you work in terms of complementaries, so as sure as there is a blue, there is going to be a yellow, orange, and so on. Do you take some blue and get it on the canvas and get it in a shape and from there-?
M-W: Not necessarily, Fred. No, as a matter of fact, blue has a distinct significance to me from the standpoint of spatial extension.
W: It's distance?
M-W: Yes. And to me a painting which is only on the side of the warm colors, on the yellows, yellow-oranges and so forth, is definitely lacking in something. Not that you can't make masterpieces with yellow but for me personally it is necessary. I find it necessary, to balance those things with the other side of the spectrum. I think this will perhaps demonstrate this thing. I call it Arabian Nights. Now I start that thing in drawing. I probvably put down certain lines that interest me. Then I put one color down which dictates the rest of them. Then I get to a certain point and it looks to me like one of the stories in the Arabian Nights where the Genie comes out of the bottle. So I called it Arabian Nights. You can call it a cockeyed flower if you like, but tha's what it gave to mel
W: If the blues are for space, for distance, do you start with something that is more concrete in a foreground, which would mean the hot or the yellow-orange side of the spectrum likes this figure? (In L'Age d'Or; see Soleilles)
M-W: Well now, you point that out and you bring up some thing which I never thought of before. The first thing that I did in that picture was that central jumping figure, everything works from that, and that's the warm colors but they necessitate balancing them one way or the other with the cold side of the spectrum. [end of page c]
[p. d] W: You reach for a thing and then begin to use complementary colors to wrap the space around it?
M-W: Well, I'm going to correct you on one thing. They're not complementary, they're harmonic. If you take yellow, violet is a complementary. I never use a violet or a thing where I have yellow, I use a blue violet or a red violet. And it's the same thing with do re mi fa so la ti do. You don't get complementaries; you get them in minor scales but you don't get them so much in the regular diatonic major scale.
W: Are you musical? I'm very unmusical.
M-W: I studied music for seventeen years. I think I'm the only man alive who ever read Schoenberg in the original. It took me nineteen dictionaries and I got nothing out of it, but I read it.
W: What is the relationship of the kinds of rhythm which appeal to you and your feeling for music? Is this close?
M-W: I don't feel it's too close. This painting here is absolutely classical. It has what the Italians call contrapposto, the balancing of one thing over against another. It'sa all Michelangelesque in that sense.
W: Well, it's Baroque then.
M-W: I don't know that names make a difference. It's really Renaissance.
W: I have a feeling that there was more in your relationship to Oriental art and Japan than seems to be coming out. Are we too far from that?
M-W: I think it has affected me in a way that's perhaps unconscious with me. I think perhaps this makes me paint as I do-which is not like the ordinary painting-for this reason: I find that all American pictures are crowded. Now the French don't crowd their pictures, they have a distinct taste for not crowding, it is their tradition. The American crowds them as though he'd like to give you great deal for your money. I found with Oriental, particulary with the Chinese and Japanese, the opposite should be considered true. There was something to be added. With us something can always be take away without hurting and I always remembered-when I thought of that-Michalangelo's dictum that if any piece of statuary is rolled down a hill, that which comes off it in breakage is worthless.
W: Tell me. do you have any feeling about the sources of your curvilinear forms? The reason I ask, I have the impression that all abstract forms are really a disguise, that there are things under there asking to be recognized. In due course they become more recognizable or give clues to what they are and I see in your paintings that time and again they come through as figures. You play hide and seek with the figure so I assume that all these abstact forms are somehow related to figtures.
M-W: I think that every particle of composition that I have ever used is based on Michelangesque contrapposto, that is, "the hole and the bump." And the thing that's interested me is the balance of color. I think if you take any picture of mine and for the moment obscure from your thoughts all color except one, you will find that color is balanced within itself. And one of the things that interests me particularly about Chinese art is the balancing. Not of color because they didn't use it so much. Instead they used color in their costumes, their dress and so forth. But the thing that interests me is their balancing of large empty masses, of lights and darks. The total balance tha's what I saw. The Japanese who took what they could from China but could never take enough to suit me, call it Notan. It is a balance of almost what we would callchiaroscuro, light and dark.
To come to your question about figures, I think you're quite right. I think every compostiion that I have ever made, like all of my earliest work, is figurework. We were put throughj a pretty rigorous drawing of the figure under the old French system. We used to sit in there under old Jean Paul Laurens and sharpen up a crayon. He'd put up a very bad classical sculpture, and we had to make photographs of it. We could make them so that they were absolutely like photographs, they were terrible drawings. But when we got through with that horrible discipline, like a horse with blinders that allow it to see only straight ahead your hand could do whatever your mind told it to.
W: I have often thought that Cubism was perhaps a delaying maneuver. It provided, at least with Picasso, a certain amount of protection while there was a piece of machinery being developed over years with which he could re-attack the human figure.
M-W: I tell you, Cubism has become a dirty word but to me it is the semantics of form. It's almost what Ingres said when he said that drawing is the probity of art. It seems to me that Cubism was the entrance into a scientific age in . . . [p. e] which everything had to have the absolute precision of a machine.
W: Are you saying tha Picasso and Braque were tht Wright brothers of the century who got it off the ground.?
M-W: I think that precision was necessary to bring in the painting of the century and I think Cubism did it.
W: But in your things the form is much more organic as you were saying. They're human form, they're feminine forms it seems to me whereas in Cubism even when recognizable forms came in they weren't flowing or sweeping.
M-W: Matisse said to me once, he said, "I was sent down to Italy to make some copies for the government, and I got so damn sick of looking at these portraits in which the right deltoid was exactly the same, reversed, as the left deltoid. I couldn't use that when I came back." He said, "If I don't like a shoulder I'll leave it off."
W: We ought to get a little deeper into this philosophy of Synchromy which is, after all, the main stem in your art, the thing to which you return. Do you want to compare the early Synchromy and the later Synchromy? There is a half of a lifetime between them. What do you see that you have brought into your late paintings?
M-W: It's possible that I have eliminated a good deal of unnecessary matter through a simplification which was brought to me by the Oriental people. I think there is a greater control of composition, an unconscious control from having done it so long. It's like a man juggling, you take three balls and it's hard to juggle them, take four and it's almost impossible but when you can juggle fifteen or twenty with a billiard cue, two basins full of water and some golf balls you don't think of it. It's an unconscious thing. When you first start you keep your mind on every one of those three balls but when you get to the point when you use twenty-five differentt object it happens unconsciously. I think I've gotten to a point where what I've got to say I say entirely unconsciously, from habit, or tradition, or from conditioning. I think there's much less of the actual earthy aspect which I had in the earlier work. Still there is the evident or even obvious aspect of the formal extension of color into space which I got from readingt the Trattato della Pittura of Leonardo da Vinci. In one sentence he says as nature recedes from the eye it becomes violet. Now I said if it becomes violet as it recedes from the eye what is it when it comes closest to the eye? What are the intermediate steps, because that color spectrum is a thing whch extends itself into, let us say, an imaginary space, that is into a third-dimensional imaginative space. Alfred Barr says, "I see something much more spiritual in your work today than I saw when you first did it." I'm perfectly willing to take his word on it.
W: Now, let's say the same thing in another way. I have a feeling that one of the drives in you as I look at your work is an instinct for refinement and I suspect that ia one of the things that drew you toward Oriental art.
M-W: You're quite right, and I think that's the reason that I'm very fond of Persian art and I'm very fond of the great work of the Japanese and of the Chinese particularly, and I do not like the work that the Japanese do in what they call their Zen painting. The Japanese have lost the elegance which they once had. Russell used to look at me and he'd say, "sacre aristo." It's simply a tempermental thing, God help me. I can't help it, that's all."
W: Now this leads us to a little paradox. You are primarily a colorist but I have a feeling that if one brings refinement into the brew beyond a certain point the artist begins to shrink from color. I suspect at that is true in Oriental art, that color has been refined out of it. I suspect that that is an instinctual refinement which has chased it out.
M-W: Well, you saw the machine I had down here [A multiple color projector "Synchrome Kineidoscope" created by MacDonald-Wright in 1960.] that is not getting away from color. That is the utilization of color in its purest form, that's all. But you're quite right except for this fact. I don't think it's possible for me to avoid color. A man can make masterpieces in anything, it's simply that some people like color, some people don't. I like color, that's the thing that interests me primarily. I've often sat in front of this canvas and said, damn it, I'm sick of looking at my own color. I want to do this in monotone. But when I get through, it has the same color on it as if I'd never thought of it before. But it's a temperamental thing whether you like color or not. Some people are sensitive to color, some people can taste things, some people can smell things.
It's simply the question, I think, with a painter or with anybody else. If you're dedicated to a particular thing. The only things that I was ever interested in in my life are two: women and art. Outside of that I've had no damned interests at all. All my teaching at the University, the moment I stopped that thing, I tried my best to get it out of my mind, and succeeded. I had exhausted it. I feel that I've exhausted classical Western art. I shall never go back to Europe again, never.
" . . .
Exhibition Catalogue (117 numbers)
"The absence of a bibliography, list of catalogues, articles, views, etc., is at the artist's request. We are grateful to be able to refer to the scholarly compilation in the catalogue, St. MacDonald-Wright, published by the National Collection of Fine Arts by the Smithsonian Press, Washington, D.C., 1967."