March Issue 2001
Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism: Chronology
1890 - July 8 - Stanton Macdonald-Wright (SMW) born in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Archibald Davenport Wright, and Annie van Vranken Wright; an older brother, Willard Huntington Wright (WHW), was born 15 October 1887.
1900 - SMW moves with family to Santa Monica, California.
1906 - SMW begins study at the Art Students League of Los Angeles with Warren Hedges (18831910) and Joseph Greenbaum (18641940); befriends fellow student and modernist painter Rex Slinkard (18871918).
1909 - June 27 - SMW leaves for Europe; arrives in Paris in the fall and takes studio on rue Notre Dame des Champs. Meets fellow American art student Thomas Hart Benton (18891975), who becomes a close friend. SMW attends lectures at the Sorbonne and comes in contact with Henri Focillon (18811943), who introduces SMW to Asian art and philosophy. Briefly attends the Académies Julian, the Colarossi, and Casteluccho.
1911 - SMW tours London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Antwerp, and Brussels. Meets Morgan Russell (MR; 18861953); Russell takes SMW to the atelier of Percyval Tudor-Hart (18731954), the Canadian painter and color theorist; MR and SMW study with and work for Tudor-Hart and during this time study color theory extensively and undertake the researches that lead to the founding of Synchromism. MR introduces SMW to Matisse, Rodin, and Gertrude and Leo Stein.
1913 - June 1 - 30 - Two-person exhibition,
"Ausstellung der Synchromisten Morgan Russell, S. Macdonald-Wright,"
Der Neue Kunstsalon, Munich.
27 October - 8 November - Two-person exhibition, "Les Synchromistes:
Morgan Russell et S. Macdonald-Wright," Galerie Bernheim-Jeune,
Paris. In his individual introduction in the exhibition catalogue,
SMW writes: "We are incapable of imagining a form that is
not the result of some contact of our senses with nature. Or at
least the forms that issue from this contact are infinitely more
expressive and varied than those born of the inventive labor of
the intellect. So far as form is concerned, one must maintain
a relationship with nature. In opposition to purely logical theories,
we mean to stay true to reality. In it is the foundation of every
pictorial work."
1914 - March 2 - 16 - Two-person exhibition, "Exhibition of Synchromist Paintings by Morgan Russell and S. MacDonald-Wright," Carroll Galleries, New York. In their introduction to the exhibition catalogue, SMW and MR write: "Besides solving the problem of the inherent nature of colors in their relation to form, we have applied ourselves to a close study of the harmonious relation of these colors to one another. And, as a result of the incorporation of these colors into gamut-form, they convey the notion of 'time' in painting. They give the illusion that the canvas develops like music, in time, while both the old and modern paintings exist strictly in space. With one glance they can be felt in their entirety."
1915 - February - SMW collaborates with WHW on Modern Art: Its Tendency and Meaning, published in November.
1916 - March 13 - 25 - Group exhibition, "The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters," Anderson Galleries, New York. SMW and WHW are among the organizers of this important exhibition.
1917 - March 20 - 31 - One-person exhibition, "Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by S. Macdonald-Wright" at the Photo-Secession Gallery ("291"), New York.
1918 - October 12 -- SMW leaves New York for Southern California.
1920 - SMW begins work on a stop-motion color film process and completes a full-length feature that is destroyed in a fire at the Blum Laboratories, Hollywood.
February 1 - 29 - Group exhibition, "Exhibition of Paintings by American Modernists," organized by SMW with the help of WHW and Alfred Stieglitz, at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, Exposition Park (the art division is now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; hereafter referred to as the Los Angeles Museum). SMW gives several lectures there on modern art.
1923 - SMW begins teaching at the Los Angeles Art Students League; soon takes over as director.
February - Group exhibition, "The First Exhibition of the Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles," Taos Building, West First Street, Los Angeles.
1924 - SMW writes and privately publishes A Treatise on Color, which summarizes the synchromist method; "I have just gotten out a book on color, 60 copies with handmade charts of spectrums, which I hope to sell at $10 each. This is in the hands of God" (SMW to MR).
1925 - Modern Art Workers group of painters organized.
5 October - Exhibit at the Hollywood Library Art Gallery; SMW writes manifesto and speaks at exhibition opening.
1927 February -- "Synchromism," Los Angeles Museum, featuring work of SMW and MR.
SMW writing, directing and staging Synchromist Theater in Santa Monica, makes use of projected color with a device related to his and MR's ongoing interest in building a kinetic light machine.
April - SMW stars as Pancho Lopez, a Mexican bandit, in The Bad Man by Porter Emerson Browne, stage sets by Albert Henry King.
1932 - January 4 - 23 - Two-person exhibition, "Exhibition by S. Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell," New Stendahl Art Galleries, Los Angeles.
February - Show travels to Los Angeles Museum.
October 3 - 29 - One-person exhibition, "S. Macdonald-Wright: 13 New Paintings," An American Place, New York. From SMW's artist's statement for that show: "To me reality exists within-hence my lack of interest in the topical."
1933 - SMW writes "A Basis of Culture," an unpublished survey of world art.
1934 - January - SMW begins planning mural cycle for the Santa Monica Public Library, sponsored by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP); finishes first section in April.
1935 - August - Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) founded as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, under the direction of Holger Cahill; established in California in November, SMW hired that month as a non-relief professional artist.
August 25 - Santa Monica Public Library murals finished and dedicated to Archibald Davenport Wright and the City of Santa Monica. "They [the mural panels depicting the technical and imaginative pursuits of man] coalesce and fuse in what perhaps holds the greatest potentialities for art expression invented by man-the medium of the moving picture" (SMW, speaking on the occasion of the dedication).
December -- SMW becomes WPA/FAP district supervisor for Los Angeles County.
1936 - March 10 - 28 - Group exhibition, "Ten Pacific Coast Painters: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Group," Carl Fischer Gallery, New York.
1941 - 29 August - 3 September - Holger Cahill prepares a field report on the Southern California FAP and writes: "On the basis of production the Southern California Art Project not only leads the other projects of the Pacific Coast, but also all other WPA art projects. It has produced more creative work in proportion to employment than any other state art project, and it has maintained standards of quality in this production equal to those of any other art project in the country."
1942 - June - SMW starts to write column for Rob Wagner's Script, continues for four years.
1942 June -- SMW starts to write column for Rob Wagner's Script, continues for four years.
November 12 -- SMW becomes lecturer for the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
1946 - At UCLA, teaching Asian art and seminar in contemporary art.
9 April - 19 May - Group show, "Pioneers of Modern Art in America," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
1948 - 22 October -12 November - Retrospective exhibition, "Thirty-five Years of Creative Painting by Stanton Macdonald-Wright," Art Center School Gallery, Los Angeles.
1952 - October 25 - SMW travels to Tokyo under aegis of Fulbright scholarship to study Chinese and Japanese painting and sculpture; in Tokyo in December, teaches two courses on modern art.
1953 - March - Health failing, SMW returns to America from Tokyo, where he had completed his unpublished manuscript, Beyond Aesthetics.
1955 - January 1 - SMW elevated to rank of professor emeritus, UCLA, having retired officially as of 31 December 1954.
1956 - 19 January - 19 February -- Retrospective exhibition, "A Retrospective Showing of the Work of Stanton MacDonald-Wright," Los Angeles Museum. SMW says at the time: "At first I saw my new painting with a certain astonishment, for I had made a great circle, coming back after 35 years to an art that was, superficially, not unlike the canvasses of my youth. However, at bottom there was a great difference. I had achieved an interior realism. . . . This is a sense of reality which cannot be seen but which is evident by feeling."
1959 - SMW builds, after decades of experimentation, consultation, false starts and near-successes, the first version of the Synchrome Kineidoscope, a light machine first conceived of in Paris with MR.
1960 - August - Group exhibition, "Fifty Paintings by Thirty-seven Painters of the Los Angeles Area," San Francisco Museum of Art, curated by Henry Hopkins.
1963 - 27 February - 14 April - Group exhibition, "The Decade of the Armory Show," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
1965 - January - In Kyoto, SMW conceives of the Haiga series of color woodblocks.
"Don't forget that when a well-known man dies, his historians write 'he was a universal genius-great as a poet, writer, theatrical director, painter, lecturer, high jumper, lover, gourmet, etc., etc.' The public loves to hear of a dead universal genius-it abhors, hates, distrusts a living one. A man must be a specialist in one field. He may write poetry and novels, he may paint and draw, and get away with it. But he becomes anathema when he paints and writes" (SMW to Jan Stussy, January 1965).
12 October - 6 November - Group exhibition, "Synchromism and Color Principles in American Painting, 19101930," M. Knoedler and Co., New York, organized by William C. Agee.
1967 - 4 May - 18 June - Retrospective exhibition, "The Art of Stanton Macdonald-Wright," National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
1970 - 16 November - 20 December - One-person exhibition, "Stanton Macdonald-Wright: A Retrospective Exhibition, 19111970," UCLA Art Galleries/The Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation.
1973 - 22 August, evening - SMW dies at the age of 83 of a heart attack at his home in the Pacific Palisades; services at Chapel of the Dawn, at Gates, Kingsley and Gates Mortuary, Santa Monica.
1978 - 24 January - 26 March - Group exhibition, "Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 19101925," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
2001 - One-person exhibition, "Myth, Music, and Color: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism," organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.
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