![Cosmic Synchrony](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Cosmic_Synchrony.jpg)
Synchromism was an
art movement
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, (usually a few months, years or decades) or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defin ...
founded in 1912 by
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
artists
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, the ...
Stanton Macdonald-Wright
Stanton Macdonald-Wright (July 8, 1890 – August 22, 1973), was a modern American artist. He was a co-founder of Synchromism, an early abstract, color-based mode of painting, which was the first American avant-garde art movement to receive inte ...
(1890–1973) and
Morgan Russell
Morgan Russell (January 25, 1886 – May 29, 1953) was a modern American artist. With Stanton Macdonald-Wright, he was the founder of Synchromism, a provocative style of abstract painting that dates from 1912 to the 1920s. Russell's "synchromie ...
(1886–1953). Their abstract "synchromies," based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art. Though it was short-lived and did not attract many adherents, Synchromism became the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention. One of the difficulties inherent in describing Synchromism as a coherent style is connected to the fact that some Synchromist works are purely abstract while others include representational imagery.
Theory and style
Synchromism is based on the idea that
color
Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...
and
sound
In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.
In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...
are similar phenomena and that the colors in a
painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ...
can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a
composer
A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music.
Etymology and Defi ...
arranges
note
Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to:
Music and entertainment
* Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music
* ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian
* ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened version ...
s in a
symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning com ...
. Macdonald-Wright and Russell believed that, by painting in color
scales
Scale or scales may refer to:
Mathematics
* Scale (descriptive set theory), an object defined on a set of points
* Scale (ratio), the ratio of a linear dimension of a model to the corresponding dimension of the original
* Scale factor, a number w ...
, their visual work could evoke the same complex sensations as
music
Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...
. As Macdonald-Wright said,"Synchromism simply means 'with color' as symphony means 'with sound.'" The phenomenon of "hearing" a color or the pairing of two or more senses--
synesthesia
Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who re ...
—was also central to the work of
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (; rus, Василий Васильевич Кандинский, Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy, vɐˈsʲilʲɪj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ kɐnʲˈdʲinskʲɪj; – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter a ...
, who was developing his own synesthetic paintings, or "compositions," in Europe at approximately the same time.
The
abstract "synchromies" are based on color scales, using rhythmic color forms with advancing and reducing hues. They typically have a central
vortex
In fluid dynamics, a vortex ( : vortices or vortexes) is a region in a fluid in which the flow revolves around an axis line, which may be straight or curved. Vortices form in stirred fluids, and may be observed in smoke rings, whirlpools in th ...
and explode in complex color
harmonies
In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches ( tones, notes), or chords. However ...
. The Synchromists avoided using atmospheric perspective or line, relying solely on color and shape to express form. Macdonald-Wright and Russell were among a number of avant-garde artists at work in the period immediately before World War I who believed that realism in the visual arts had long since reached a point of exhaustion and that, to be meaningful in the modern world, painting needed to sever any ties to older ideas about perspective and to literary or anecdotal content.
The earliest Synchromist works were similar to
Fauvist
Fauvism /ˈfoʊvɪzm̩/ is the style of ''les Fauves'' (French for "the wild beasts"), a group of early 20th-century modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retai ...
paintings. The multi-colored shapes of Synchromist paintings also loosely resembled those found in the
Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Macdonald-Wright insisted, however, that Synchromism was a unique art form and "has nothing to do with Orphism and anybody who has read the first catalogue of Synchromism ... would realize that we poked fun at Orphism." The Synchromists' debts to Orphism remain a source of debate among art historians. Their approach more clearly owed something to Cubism. The Synchromists made use of the broken planes of the Cubists, but their lavishly colored areas of paint sometimes looked, as the art historian Abraham Davidson has described them, like "eddies of mist, the droplets of which collect to form parts of a straining torso....To find anything like this in American painting one has to wait for the color-field canvases of Jules Olitski in the 1960s."
History
Synchromism was developed by Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell while they were studying in Paris during the early 1910s. In 1907, Stanton Macdonald-Wright studied the ideas of optical scientists such as Michel-Eugene Chevreul, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Ogden Rood in order to further develop color theory influenced by musical harmonies. Then from 1911 to 1913, they both studied under the Canadian painter
Percyval Tudor-Hart, whose color theory connected qualities of color to qualities of music, such as
tone to
hue
In color theory, hue is one of the main properties (called color appearance parameters) of a color, defined technically in the CIECAM02 model as "the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that ...
and
intensity to
saturation
Saturation, saturated, unsaturation or unsaturated may refer to:
Chemistry
* Saturation, a property of organic compounds referring to carbon-carbon bonds
**Saturated and unsaturated compounds
** Degree of unsaturation
**Saturated fat or fatty aci ...
. Also influential upon Macdonald-Wright and Russell were the
Impressionists
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open Composition (visual arts), composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating ...
, Cézanne and Matisse with their emphasis of color over drawing. In addition to the Cubists and Impressionists, Macdonald-Wright and Russell were also inspired by artists such as Émile Bernard, who was a
Cloisonnist, and the
Synthetist Paul Gauguin for their unique explorations of the properties and effects of color. Russell coined the term "Synchromism" in 1912, in an express attempt to convey the linkage of painting and music.
The first Synchromist painting, Russell's ''Synchromy in Green,'' exhibited at the
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
Salon des Indépendants
Salon may refer to:
Common meanings
* Beauty salon, a venue for cosmetic treatments
* French term for a drawing room, an architectural space in a home
* Salon (gathering), a meeting for learning or enjoyment
Arts and entertainment
* Salon (P ...
in 1913. Later that year, the first Synchromist exhibition by Macdonald-Wright and Russell was shown in Munich. Exhibitions followed in Paris in October 1913 and in New York in March 1914. Macdonald-Wright moved back to the United States in 1914, but he and Russell continued separately to paint abstract synchromies. Synchromism remained influential among artists well into the 1920s, though its purely abstract period was relatively brief. Many synchromies of the late 1910s and 1920s contain representational elements. At no time, though, did Macdonald-Wright or Russell achieve the level of critical or commercial success they had hoped for when they introduced Synchromism to the United States. It was not until after Russell's death and late in Macdonald-Wright's life that extensive museum and scholarly attention was paid to their highly original achievements. Other American painters who experimented with Synchromism include
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975),
Andrew Dasburg
Andrew Michael Dasburg (4 May 1887 – 13 August 1979) was an American modernist painter and "one of America's leading early exponents of cubism".
Biography
Dasburg was born in 1887 in Paris. He emigrated from Germany to New York City wit ...
(1887–1979),
Patrick Henry Bruce
Artist Patrick Henry Bruce (3rd from left) & friends/associates in front of the entrance to a 300px
Patrick Henry Bruce (March 25, 1881 – November 12, 1936) was an American cubist painter.
Biography
A descendant of Patrick Henry, Bruce wa ...
(1880–1936), and
Albert Henry Krehbiel (1873–1945).
The earliest extended discussion of Synchromism appeared in the book ''Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning'' (1915) by Willard Huntington Wright. Wright was a literary editor and art critic and the brother of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and the book was secretly co-authored by Stanton. It surveyed the major modern art movements from Manet to Cubism, praised the work of Cézanne (at the time relatively unknown in the United States), denigrated "lesser Moderns" such as Kandinsky and the Futurists (and, of course, the Orphists), and predicted a coming age in which color abstraction would supplant representational art. Synchromism is presented in the book as the culminating point in the evolution of modernism. Willard Huntington Wright never acknowledged that he was writing about his own brother's work.
[Loughery, pp. 94–97.]
Three other extended treatments of Synchromism can be found in the catalogue by Gail Levin that accompanied a major traveling exhibition organized the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978, ''Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925,'' in Marilyn Kushner's catalogue for a 1990 Morgan Russell retrospective at the Montclair Museum, and in ''Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism'' by Will South, a catalogue-biography published in conjunction with a three-museum exhibition of the artist's work in 2001. Levin and South are the two art historians most responsible for attracting scholarly and public attention to Synchromism, a movement that has often occupied a minor place in twentieth-century art-history textbooks.
See also
*
Synesthesia
Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who re ...
Notes
Sources
* Brown, Milton. ''American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression.'' Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.
* Davidson, Abraham A. ''Early American Modernist Painting, 1910–1935.'' New York: DaCapo, 1994.
* Kushner, Marilyn. ''Morgan Russell.'' New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990.
* Hughes, Robert. ''American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America.'' New York: Knopf, 1997.
*
Hunter, Sam. ''Modern American Painting and Sculpture.'' New York: Dell, 1959.
* Levin, Gail. ''Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925.'' New York: George Braziller, 1978.
* Loughery, John. ''Alias S.S. Van Dine.'' New York: Scribners, 1992.
* South, Will. ''Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism.'' Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001.
*
Synchromism: Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright'' New York:
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* Wright, Willard Huntington Wright. ''Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning.'' New York: John Lane & Co., 1915.
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