Special Features

March Issue 2001

Stanton Macdonald-Wright: Discover the Man and His Art

Exhibition Co-curator Will South Discusses Macdonald-Wright and the Legacy of Synchromism

In this interview, exhibition co-curator Will South, curator of collections at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina­Greensboro, provides insight into both the man and his art.

QUESTION: The North Carolina Museum of Art organized an exhibition of works by Rodin, one of the best-known sculptors in Western art, and hosted an exhibition featuring Ansel Adams, almost certainly the best-loved photographer in American history. But this time the Museum is mounting a show devoted to a man many visitors will not know. Who is Stanton Macdonald-Wright? And why devote a three-month exhibition to him?

SOUTH: Our visitors should know about him if they're interested in the history of American art at all. But to understand why, we have to look at the origins of modern art in this country. So often the tendency has been to say that modern art in its infancy in this country was really no more than knockoffs of what was going on in Europe - this artist looked like Picasso, the next artist like Braque - and to say that American art didn't gain any unique identity until Abstract Expressionism after the Second World War, with painters such as Jackson Pollock. But if we back up to before the First World War, we find a number of creative geniuses working in American art: Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Alfred Stieglitz. Stanton Macdonald-Wright was among that group of creative geniuses, and though his name never pops up, he was arguably as creative as any of them, if not more so. At that pivotal time when abstraction was emerging in Europe, Macdonald-Wright was right there, working at the same time as Picasso, Braque, the Delaunays. Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, working together, were the first Americans to found an abstract painting movement in Europe before the First World War - a movement they termed Synchromism. These two artists believed that color had sound equivalents, and the word synchromy means "with color" the way symphony means "with sound." They believed that by painting in color scales in the same way that one composes with musical scales, you could create paintings that would evoke in the viewer musical sensations. Europeans at that time knew about these theories and were riled up about them. And when Macdonald-Wright brought the movement back to New York, he again created a stir. He was also integral in organizing an exhibition called the Forum Exhibition of American Modernism, to present great abstract American painters in the same way that the Armory Show of 1913 introduced America to modern painting. In short, Macdonald-Wright was at the center of a lot of things happening at the birth of modernism. He was in Paris; he was in New York. He was one of the first American modernists to paint abstractly. And he single-handedly brought modern art to the West Coast.

QUESTION: If he was so integral to the birth of modernism, then why haven't we heard of him?

SOUTH: There's a quick and easy answer. Of all of the artists surrounding Alfred Stieglitz before the war - O'Keeffe, Dove, Marin and the rest - Macdonald-Wright was the only one who moved west. When he moved to California in 1918, he dropped off the art history radar, never to be recorded again in the New York survey books or the major studies of American art. One of the questions we have to ask is: Was there an East Coast bias in the writing of art history that left off West Coast artists? What we find is that yes, there was. In fact, only in the last 10 to 15 years have we caught up with early modern California art at all. Los Angeles was a couple of thousand miles from New York, where the exhibitions were, the big museums were, the critics were. But Macdonald-Wright didn't care. It was a lifestyle he was looking for, and so he left. And that's partly the reason we don't know him.

QUESTION: So this exhibition breaks new ground in many ways?

SOUTH: Yes, it does. What was unique about Synchromism? Most people don't really know, especially in terms of how it influenced other artists, communities, critics, because no one has ever looked at the artist's career in that way. This exhibition systematically addresses all of the important questions: What did he do? When did he do it? Who knew about it? Who was influenced by it? Let's answer the central question, "Why should we know Stanton Macdonald-Wright?" We should know about him because he was a significant chapter in the birth of modern art in America, and a very significant chapter in the birth of modernist painting in general in the western half of the United States.

QUESTION: What can visitors expect with his artwork?

SOUTH: Brilliantly colored canvases, multicolored palettes, rhythms, curving lines, broad shapes. These are very animated paintings. Stanton was a dreamer. He unashamedly, unabashedly looked for transcendence in painting. He wanted to create images that would take you physically, emotionally, spiritually outside of yourself - create some other state of mind, bigger than what you would normally experience in your day-to-day life.

QUESTION: And in terms of his subject matter?

SOUTH: His early abstract works were these big swirling masses of color. But at the same time that he was interested in advancing abstract painting, he was also very much a classicist - enamored of the Renaissance, the Greeks, the Romans. There is often this big, heroic figure that one of his abstractions is based on, and if you look hard enough, you'll find the musculature, the arms, the back swirling in this colored mass. After the First World War, Macdonald-Wright returned to figurativepainting, and his interest in Asian art and philosophy flowered - partly because of his immediate association with Chinatown and with Japanese Americans in L.A. He began studying both languages and began to wed Asian influences with his figurative interests, and the next thing you know, he produced this hybrid art with a synchromist palette of bold spectral colors and rhythms, with big muscular figures based on Michelangelo and with Asian influences. One canvas could reflect modern art, Michelangelo and Sung dynasty painting. For Macdonald-Wright, that was fair game. Art could be pleasing, entertaining, even feel-good, but the greater role of art was to allow you to recognize the interconnectedness of things. Macdonald-Wright became very much a believer, almost in a Zen-like way, in the interconnectedness of all things, and art was a way to break down the barriers between East and West. In that regard, he was politically correct before his time. He predicted civilizations that were less and less divisive and people who became more and more unified through shared technology, shared language, shared beliefs. A lot of those things he was talking about in the '20s, we're seeing happening now.

QUESTION: What more should we know about the man behind the paintings?

SOUTH: Stanton could just do anything and do it well. He was an astonishment to his family, friends and anyone who ever met him because no matter what he took up, he could do it with incredible facility. He wrote textbooks, criticism, essays, treatises. He not only wrote plays but he designed sets for them and even starred in them - plays that were reviewed well in the Christian Science Monitor. He could play guitar and sing, and he composed music that he often painted to. He even wrote an opera. When he was younger, he liked to box and apparently was pretty fearsome. He was also a gourmet cook, and he would amaze friends with these extraordinarily exquisite dinners; and those could be Italian or French or Japanese. He was a linguist. Not only did he speak French fluently, but he got by in Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. He picked up those languages well enough that he actually lectured in Japan - an astonishing accomplishment for someone born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1890 and living in California most of his life. He was an amateur engineer, and he worked on a kinetic light machine, a project that was ultimately realized. On top of all that, he was a legendary ladies' man. How he found the time to be a Romeo, I don't know, but he left a lot of broken hearts in his wake. And all the time that he was engaged in these various things, he was painting the whole time, painting murals, creating mosaics, even designing and building furniture. Macdonald-Wright's energies and skills were so great that he was never afraid to take on anything.

QUESTION: You've studied Stanton Macdonald-Wright for several years. What first interested you in this painter? And how did this exhibition evolve?

SOUTH: I first became aware of Macdonald-Wright when I was a painting student myself in L.A. in the 1970s. For an art history class, we were assigned to write a paper on a local painting. My painting instructor, Pauline Majoli, had been a student of Macdonald-Wright's, and when I asked her where I should go to find an interesting painting, she told me I should check out one of his works. So I went to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and down in the vault I saw a painting called Yin Synchromy, No. 3. I had my girlfriend with me, who is now my wife, and we just fell in love with this painting. From then on, Macdonald-Wright was always in the back of my mind. I knew about him, couldn't believe he wasn't better known, but wasn't really worried about it.

Then in 1990, when I was fishing around for a dissertation topic for my doctoral thesis, here was Stanton again. In New York, my fellow students knew all of the early modernists, down to birth date and death date, but a lot of people had never heard of Macdonald-Wright, and I thought that was crazy. So I picked him for my dissertation topic. While I was working on that, I thought that at some point I would turn this into an exhibition, but that idea met with a lot of resistance, because a lot of curators and institutions believed that he wasn't well known enough to do the show. My thought was that the way to make him be well known was to do the show, so it was the proverbial catch-22. But though I kept running into walls, I would talk to anyone who was interested in talking about it. And that's how I met Alan and Fannie Leslie, old friends of the artist, in Palm Springs. After I gave them a copy of my dissertation, they promised to help me find a museum, and one of the museums they contacted was this one. North Carolina already had a reputation for reviving under-recognized artists, because of the Louis Rémy Mignot show, and both John Coffey and Larry Wheeler thought Macdonald-Wright was a great artist. Suddenly we had discussions going on and before I knew it, we had a contract to do the show. And now that painting that I first saw in the 1970s in the basement of the Santa Barbara is on the cover of the catalogue.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the Museum at 919/839-6262 or at (http://www.ncartmuseum.org).

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