Santa Monica Master’s Works Shown at LACMA In First Full Retrospective

Color, Myth, and Music: 
Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism

Macdonald-Wright.

Yin Synchromy No. 3, 1930, oil on canvas, Macdonald-Wright. All illustrations, courtesy of Los Angeles Museum of Art.

Macdonald-Wright’s mural in Santa Monica Public Library.

   When Stanton Macdonald-Wright arrived in Santa Monica in 1900, he and it were very young. He was 10. The little beach town had just marked its 25th year and had only 3,000 residents.
   Archibald Wright and Annie Wright moved to Santa Monica from Charlottesville, Virginia with their two sons, Willard, 13, and Stanton, 10, when Wright, having sold his Virginia properties, took a job as manager of the Arcadia Hotel, then said to be the finest hotel on the Southern California coast. 
   A number of remarkable people have made their marks in Santa Monica, but arguably none is quite as remarkable as Stanton Macdonald-Wright.
   On August 4, the first full retrospective of Macdonald-Wright’s work will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He was one of America’s early modernist masters, and the exhibition (which will run through October 28), Color, Myth and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism examines the evolution of his art from his important Synchromist works, continues with his masterful Asian-influenced paintings, and offers a selection of the stunning synchromies painted in the final years of his life. Spanning six decades, the exhibition includes more than 60 works and much archival material. 

   Synchromism
   Macdonald-Wright, with fellow American painter Morgan Russell, fathered the Synchromism movement. Convinced that color and sound were equivalent phenomena and that one could “orchestrate” the colors in a painting the way a composer arranged notes and chords in a musical composition, they developed a system of painting based on color scales. The system entailed constructing form and depth in a painting through advancing and reducing hues. Their ensuing “synchromies” were some of the first abstract non-objective paintings in American art.

   A Prince of a Boy
   Young Stanton believed that he was a prince, read voraciously, studied with tutors, caroused with other renegades, attended the Art Students’ League of Los Angeles, worked briefly and unmemorably in a doctor’s office and department store and, at 17, married the first of his five wives. 
   His wife was older than he, and rich, and they soon left Santa Monica for Paris where he attended classes at the Sorbonne and studied painting at several traditional academies. But he soon abandoned formal study to explore the radical new approaches of Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Orphism that were then emerging and challenging traditional art. It was then that he met Morgan Russell and was introduced to Matisse, Rodin, Percyval Tudor-Hart, a Canadian painter and color theorist, and collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein. 
   Macdonald-Wright and Russell exhibited their new aesthetic first in Munich, then in Paris in 1913, and the following year in New York. Synchromism became the first American avant-garde movement that was recognized in the international arena.
   At the onset of World War I, Macdonald-Wright returned to the United States and settled in New York City, where he continued to exhibit his synchromist works at some of the most progressive galleries in the United States: Stieglitz’s Gallery 291, the Montross Gallery, and Charles Daniel Gallery. He was also instrumental in organizing, in 1916, the landmark Forum Exhibition that helped establish the role of modernism in American art.

   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). 
   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 spoke endlessly of the inevitable unity of the two cultures, but also attempted to fuse Eastern and Western elements in his own work. 
   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.”
   Macdonald-Wright’s Santa Monica Projects Curiously, the Great Depression which seized America in the 1930s gave Macdonald-Wright a unique opportunity to create some large-scale works in Santa Monica. Under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project, he painted an extraordinary mural cycle in the Santa Monica Public Library, eight panels of which are included in the LACMA exhibition. It was the most extensive such project ever undertaken in Southern California. At a City Council meeting to approve the project, about $950 was collected to pay for the requisite materials. Macdonald-Wright devoted 18 months to the mural which traces the history of the region from prehistoric times to the birth of the movies, for which he was paid little or nothing, 
   As shown in the photograph on this page, the mural was far grander than its setting. 
   When the old Public library was torn down, the mural – which Macdonald-Wright had wisely painted on removable panels — was dispatched by the City to the Smithsonian Institution where it has resided ever since. Not long ago, City Councilman Ken Genser proposed that a place be made for the mural in the Main Library addition.
   Because of his significant place in the Los Angeles art world, Macdonald-Wright was appointed director of the Los Angeles District of the Southern California Region of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. In addition to promoting the project, Macdonald-Wright worked with the architects on various projects and designed numerous mosaics for local buildings – including the murals in the lobby of the Santa Monica City Hall, itself a WPA project, as well as painting the fire curtain mural and designing the mosaic in the lobby of Barnum Hall, the theater on the Santa Monica High School campus.
   The City Hall murals are done in petracrome, a process Wright developed which combines cement with crushed bits of marble, tile and granite. One of the City Hall murals depicts the arrival of the Spanish explorers in Southern California and the Mexican settlement. The other features such 1930s elements as sailboats, airplanes and road races. 
   Built in 1937, Barnum Hall is one of the finest examples of the elegant Streamline Moderne architecture which flourished in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Like City Hall, it was a project of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration and Federal Arts Project. 
   And so it was that in one of this country’s darkest decades Macdonald-Wright made bright and enduring works in Santa Monica’s library, City Hall and high school auditorium. Today, City Hall and Barnum Hall head the roster of distinguished regional landmarks. 

   Modernist to Ancient Sage
   In the final decades of his life, Stanton Macdonald-Wright returned to Synchromism, incorporating his life experience, his belief in Eastern philosophy, and a deep understanding of Japanese and Chinese art. 
   He lived in Santa Monica for much of his life, though he decamped to an apartment on Pontius Avenue in Westwood for a while, and later bought a house in Pacific Palisades. Until his death in 1973 he continued to paint, exhibit, and write prolifically and traveled frequently, usually to Asia. 
   Three earlier retrospectives have been devoted to the artist (1956, Los Angeles County Museum; 1967, National Collection of Fine Arts; and 1970, Wight Gallery, UCLA); however, this new LACMA exhibition presents the first balanced and comprehensive examination of his life’s work, demonstrating not only the creativity of Synchromism, but his crucial role in impressing modernism on Los Angeles. 
   Always an iconoclast, Macdonald-Wright set out on a singular road as a boy and never wavered. Self-educated, astonishingly self-confident, contrary, he not only created a diverse, singular and influential body of work, he changed the course of American art. 
   His older brother, Willard Huntington Wright (1888 - 1939) is worthy of note, too. After being kicked out of Harvard for drinking absinthe in class, he went abroad to study in Paris and Munich. At 22, he became the L.A. Times’ literary critic and was promptly labeled “the boy iconoclast of Southern California” for his assaults on L.A. (i.e., “Hypocrisy, like a vast fungus, has spread over the city’s surface”). In short order, he was named editor of New York’s Smart Set. He also wrote several books of art criticism. Then, after a bout of drug addiction and a nervous breakdown, Wright literally reinvented himself. Under the pseudonym, S.S. Van Dine, he wrote a series of mysteries about a sophisticated, even effete Manhattan sleuth, modeled on himself, Philo Vance, who was featured in 27 motion pictures 
   The LACMA exhibit was organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. 
   LACMA is open Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from noon to 8 p.m., Friday from noon to 9 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and closed Wednesday. Call (323) 857-6000, or visit the web site at www.lacma.org.