Morgan Russell
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Morgan Russell (January 25, 1886 – May 29, 1953) was a modern American artist. With
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 int ...
, he was the founder of
Synchromism Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973) and Morgan Russell (1886–1953). Their abstract "synchromies," based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, were amon ...
, a provocative style of abstract painting that dates from 1912 to the 1920s. Russell's "synchromies," which analogized color to music, were an early American contribution to the rise of
Modernism Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
.


Biography

Russell was born and raised in New York City. He initially studied architecture and, after 1903, became friendly with the sculptor Arthur Lee, for whom he posed as a model and with whom he lived for a time. From 1903 to 1905, he studied sculpture at the Art Students League with Lee and James Earle Fraser; he also posed as a model for the sculpture class. With financial help from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, whom he met at the League in January 1906, he traveled to Europe to study art in Paris and Rome. Mrs. Whitney was one of the earliest and staunchest believers in Russell's talent and provided him with a monthly stipend for several years. In 1907, after returning to New York City, Russell studied painting at the New York School of Art with the noted Ashcan painter Robert Henri, among others. Returning to Paris in 1909, he studied at
Matisse Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known prima ...
’s art school, frequented Gertrude Stein's salon, and met
Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
and
Rodin François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor, generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a uniqu ...
. In Paris, Russell met
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 int ...
, a fellow expatriate, in 1911, and soon after the two began developing theories about color and its primacy in the creation of a meaningful work of art. Like other young adventurous artists of the time, they had come to view academic realism as a dead-end and were pondering the possibilities of an art form that might minimize or even abandon representational content. They were particularly interested in the theories of their teacher, Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart, who believed that colors could be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony. Inspired by their experience of
Delacroix Delacroix is a French surname that derives from ''de la Croix'' ("of the Cross"). It may refer to: People * Caroline Delacroix (1883–1945), French-Romanian mistress of Leopold II of Belgium * Charles-François Delacroix (1741–1805), ...
, the Post-Impressionists, and the Fauves, Russell and Macdonald-Wright co-founded Synchromism in 1912. In June of the same year, they held their first Synchromist exhibition at Der Neue Kunstsalon in Munich, followed four months later by another exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. Like other young modernists eager to make a name for themselves, they issued a manifesto broadcasting their goals, plastered the kiosks of Paris with notices of their show, and hoped to create a sensation. Russell also began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913.
Synchromism Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973) and Morgan Russell (1886–1953). Their abstract "synchromies," based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, were amon ...
was an early innovation in pure abstraction, which was developed primarily by Russell with contributions from Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Other American painters in Paris experimenting with Synchromism at the time included Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Dasburg, and Patrick Henry Bruce, all of whom were friends with Russell and Macdonald-Wright. Bruce was also friendly with Sonia and Robert Delaunay, proponents of Orphism (a term coined in 1912 by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire). Similarities between Synchromism and Orphism led to later charges of plagiarism, which both Russell and Macdonald-Wright vehemently denied. Russell and Macdonald-Wright had high hopes for acclaim and financial success when they introduced Synchromism to the New York art world. Though Russell exhibited in the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913 and in the prestigious Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters in 1916, those hopes were never met. Art collectors, critics, and curators prior to World War I were reluctant to embrace color abstraction and, on the rare occasions when they were open to radical new styles of art, preferred the European modernism attached to names with greater cachet. The first sympathetic, extended treatment of Synchromism appeared in the book ''Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning,'' published in 1915 by Macdonald-Wright's brother,
Willard Huntington Wright S. S. Van Dine (also styled S.S. Van Dine) is the pseudonym used by American art critic Willard Huntington Wright (October 15, 1888 – April 11, 1939) when he wrote detective novels. Wright was active in avant-garde cultural circles in pre-Wor ...
, a prestigious literary editor and art critic. (Stanton secretly co-authored the book, a fact that the Wright brothers were at pains to conceal.) ''Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning'' surveyed the major modern art movements from Manet to Cubism, praised the work of Cézanne and Matisse, denigrated "lesser Moderns" such as Kandinsky and the Orphists, and predicted a coming age in which abstraction would supplant representational art. Synchromism, the subject of a long, adulatory chapter, is presented in the book as the culminating point in the evolutionary process of Modernism. At no time did Wright acknowledge that he was writing about his own brother and his friend, Morgan Russell. Also, by overstating his case, Wright did little long-range good for the cause he was promoting, but his well-reviewed book did bring some informed attention to the two painters. For a time, their names appeared more frequently in the art press, and even
H.L. Mencken Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, ...
bought a Synchromist painting, which he later donated to the Baltimore Museum of Art. By 1920, Russell and Macdonald-Wright had gone their separate ways, though Macdonald-Wright continued to make efforts at selling his friend's work throughout the 1920s.Kushner, pp. 191–192. Macdonald-Wright moved back to his native California and established a successful niche for himself as a charismatic figure in the Los Angeles art world. Russell, who was a cross-dresser (though married twice), never ceased painting, either, but he experienced financial difficulties and lapsed into relative obscurity. Synchromism was seldom discussed in art-history textbooks and was not the subject of any major exhibitions before the late 1950s. Gallery exhibitions of Russell's work were infrequent. After spending almost four decades in France between 1909 and 1946, Russell retired to the United States after the war and converted to Catholicism in 1947. His painting in his later years, often of nudes, was largely figurative and displayed none of the color effects he had pioneered with Synchromism. After suffering two incapacitating strokes, he died at age of sixty-seven in a nursing home in a suburb of Philadelphia in 1953. Gradually, during the last three decades of the twentieth century, long-overdue scholarly and public attention was paid to Synchromism. The Whitney Museum of American Art launched a six-museum traveling exhibition in 1978 devoted to color abstraction that brought Russell's name before the public again, and the purchase of his papers by collector Henry Reed, and the subsequent donation to and controversial retrieval of those papers from the Whitney Museum, brought his name into the news. Morgan Russell's first museum retrospective was held at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in 1990. His work is represented today in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the
Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the San Diego Museum of Art, among others. His monumental ''Synchromy in Orange: To Form'' (1914), in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, was one of the centerpieces of the 2013 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925."


References


Sources

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External links

*Th
Jean Gabriel Lemoine papers relating to Morgan Russell, 1921–1923
at the Archives of American Art are an archival collection consisting largely of letters and letter fragments written by Morgan Russell to Jean Gabriel Lemoine, art critic for ''L'Echo de Paris''. In these letters Russell explains his art and the Synchromist style that he developed with Stanton MacDonald-Wright. * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Russell, Morgan 1886 births 1953 deaths 20th-century American painters Abstract painters American male painters Art Students League of New York alumni Painters from New York City Modern painters Students of Robert Henri 20th-century American male artists