Oil on canvas
“Form to me is color,” Stanton Macdonald-Wright stated in 1913. “When I conceive a composition of form, my imagination creates an organization of color.” The same year, Macdonald-Wright and his collaborator, Morgan Russell, co-founded an avant-garde movement that they called Synchromy. (Its name was inspired by English spellings of the Greek words “syn,” meaning “with,” and “chroma,” meaning “color.”) Together, the artists used color to convey form, movement, and emotion.
These principles are apparent in Macdonald-Wright’s Synchromy in Blue, an abstract whirl of brilliant hues that vary in terms of intensity. Prismatic and pulsing, the painting sheds light on the complex relationship between Synchromy and Cubism. Macdonald-Wright credited Cubists with shaping Synchromy’s emphasis on abstraction, but he criticized the limited palettes typical of Analytic Cubism. “We were the first people to break away from the monochromatic,” he declared of himself and Russell.
2026
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A Cubist Salon
Gallery 503What does Cubism look like? For the international network of artists who first engaged with this movement, it was a work in progress.
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