Stanton Macdonald-Wright grew up in Los Angeles, California. After spending his twenties in Paris, he returned to his hometown in the Fall of 1918. Los Angeles had rapidly industrialized, but remained artistically conservative. Returning to the opposite end of Western culture, Macdonald-Wright soon sought to advance the values and aesthetics of Synchromism, the abstract color-based art theory and style he and fellow American artist Morgan Russell had invented amid the sophistication of Parisian culture.
Two important developments became central to the artist’s new, West Coast life. First, he inherited the chair of his alma mater, The Art Students League of Los Angeles. There, he established his own art ambiance and implemented his own curriculum for students who included future California modernist Mabel Alvarez and filmmaker John Huston. The second development was Macdonald- Wright’s increasing absorption by the Chinese tradition of Taoism, a philosophy determining how to live within the natural, universal order.
Macdonald-Wright spent much time studying the Chinese language and attending Chinese traditional theater in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, where he painted scenes directly from plays he attended. Maintaining vibrant color cadences in his Synchromies, Macdonald-Wright added the human form where it had been absent in his earlier Parisian rhythms. Asian figures began to appear amidst the fusion of color opposites. Around 1925, Macdonald- Wright painted Theatre Synchromy – Bok Haw Tah in the Sword Dance, for which he chose the Chinatown’s actress Bok Haw Tah as the model. According to expert Will South, Bok Haw Tah was also the subject for both his 1925 paintings Earth Synchromy and Fire Synchromy, as well as the sitter for his Portrait of a Woman, a work reflective of the artist’s “brilliant prismatic range, subtle shifts in value, and the use of sinuous line weaving in and out of the composition.” *
After becoming director of the Santa Monica Theater Guild in 1927, Macdonald-Wright wrote four of his own plays, all based on the Eastern theater about which he had become passionate. He called this métier “Synchromist Theatre.”
The pioneering artwork that Stanton Macdonald- Wright and Morgan Russell executed together in Paris may be considered the most cutting-edge by any American moderns before World War II. Along with the coeval experiments in color theory and composition by the French-Czech duo Robert Delaunay and František Kupka, Macdonald-Wright and Russell represent the very first artists of their time to achieve full abstraction in painting, predating the non-objectivity of Russian Suprematism. The object-subject had survived the formal manipulations of Analytic Cubism, Italian Futurism, British Vorticism, and German Der Blaue Reiter, dissipating through Delaunay’s fenêtres of 1912 into his pure Orphist abstraction. While the Americans’ road to abstraction was no less sophisticated than that of the Orphists, their approach to color was different, the result of theorems, scales, and harmonies which were first debuted in 1913 at Munich’s Neue Kunstsalon.
Because of Macdonald-Wright’s seminal work in Paris in the 1910s, his achievements in the following decades are often overlooked. Nonetheless, what Stanton Macdonald-Wright accomplished in Los Angeles, particularly in the 1920s, is remarkable. He persuaded Alfred Stielglitz to recreate The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters which his brother, art critic and novelist Willard Huntington Wright, had helped organize in New York in 1916. Hence, the first Modernist show in Los Angeles opened in Exposition Park in February 1920 under the title Exhibition of American Modernists. Then, three years later, Stanton mounted the First Exhibition of the Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles which introduced the work of local, Southern California moderns. Through most of the decade Macdonald-Wright strove to produce a so-called “kinetic light machine” a full decade prior to the experiments of Swiss artist-architect Max Bill. In Los Angeles in 1924, after a decade of Synchromist work, Macdonald-Wright penned his Treatise on Color, in which he formally detailed his process to define form through color, crystallized his theories, and demonstrated himself to be the dynamic inventor and seminal artist he was.
“Both Macdonald-Wright and Russell maintained harmony and balance of form in their 1920s production, which, they felt, was consistent with their early work in abstraction and finally nonobjectivity. Retention of the movement’s name was not meant to recapture a past glory or to capitalize on whatever notoriety they could attach to their role as early moderns {. . .}: both painters genuinely felt the term still applied to their individual aesthetics.”
(South, Will, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism exhibition catalogue, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 2001, p. 88)