Stanton Macdonald-Wright

Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. He moved with his family to California in 1900 when his father became manager of the Arcadia Hotel in Santa Monica, California. The proverbial enfant terrible or "problem child," Stanton ran away from home on a windjammer when he was only eleven years old. Because the family moved so frequently, Stanton's father provided him with private tutors and art lessons with Warren Hedges and Joseph Greenbaum at the Art Students League in Los Angeles in 1906. Expelled the next year in 1907 from military school over allegations of vandalism, young Stanton married at the age of seventeen.

In 1909 Macdonald-Wright left for Europe with his new wife and mother-in-law, settling in Paris, where he took a studio and continued to study art at the Sorbonne, and at the Académies Julian, Beaux-Arts, and Colarossi. In order not to be confused with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright or the aviator Wilbur Wright, Stanton soon hyphenated his last name with Macdonald. While in Paris he met Morgan Russell, another young expatriate American artist, who introduced him to Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart, a Canadian artist and color theorist with whom both began to study.

Inspired by European modernism, including the work of the Futurists and of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Russell and Macdonald-Wright coined the term Synchromism, drawing on Greek elements meaning "system of combining color," to describe their thesis that color could generate form. They launched their new movement in Munich and Paris with co-exhibitions and shows in 1913. In New York in 1914 the Carroll Galleries mounted a show entitled Exhibition of Synchromist Paintings by Morgan Russell and S. Macdonald-Wright, bringing the movement to an American audience for the first time and establishing Synchromism as one of the earliest fully abstract art movements developed by American artists.

Macdonald-Wright would go on to have a long career as a painter, teacher, and administrator, eventually returning to California, where he directed the Southern California branch of the Federal Art Project during the Depression and taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also developed a deep engagement with East Asian aesthetics and philosophy in his later years, spending extended periods in Japan. His paintings are held in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and other major American collections, where they remain among the defining images of early American modernist abstraction.