CategoriesStyles and Movements
Synchromism
A style of abstract colour painting launched in 1913 by the Americans Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who likened colour to music.
No works indexed yet · 6 related artists
No open-access works for Synchromism are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Two young Americans in Paris, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, announced Synchromism, “with colour”, at exhibitions in Munich and Paris in 1913. The word was meant to echo “symphony”: they believed colour alone, arranged in rhythms of warm and cool hues, could create form, depth and movement as notes build music. Both had studied colour with the Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart, and they took care to distinguish their work from Robert Delaunay's Orphism.
Look for swirling, faceted planes of saturated colour, often arranged in spirals, with little drawn outline. Russell based several compositions on his drawings of Michelangelo's Dying Slave, so that a twisting body survives as bands of colour, as in Synchromy in Orange: To Form (1913–14). The movement reached New York through exhibitions in 1914 and 1916, and Thomas Hart Benton and Andrew Dasburg experimented with it before both founders returned largely to figurative painting.
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