Stanton Macdonald-Wright

2001 exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art "Color, Myth & Music: Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Synchromism". A television documentary was aired by KCET, Los Angeles.

Source: Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles.

A painter and muralist and leader of the Synchromist movement, he had a lengthy career of painting that alternated between abstraction and figurative and expressive of his interest in relationships between color and form and Oriental art.

He was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1901, he ran away from home on a windjammer to Los Angeles and studied there at the Art Students League and with Joseph Greenbaum.

In 1907, he went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, and the Beaux Arts, Colarossi, and Julian Academies, and he and artist Morgan Russell developed the style they called Synchromism. The idea was that color generates form.

Returning to the United States, he lived in New York from 1914 to 1919 and then returned to Los Angeles where he turned from Synchromism to a more Oriental style. He also produced the first full-length motion picture in color.

In the 1930s, he was a seven-states regional director of the WPA art program, and one of his commission was a very large mural for the Santa Monica Public Library. From 1942 to 1952, he taught iconography at UCLA and after retiring divided his time between Los Angeles and Kioto, Japan.

His work is in numerous collections including the Sheldon Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska; the Pasadena Art Institute, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Source: Askart.com