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Morgan Russell, along with fellow American painter Stanton
Macdonald-Wright, fathered the Synchromism movement. Convinced
that color and sound were equivalent, he wanted to “orchestrate”
the colors of a painting the way a composer arranges notes
and chords in a musical composition. The two artists developed
a system of painting based on color scales. The system consisted
of developing form and depth in a painting through advancing
and reducing hues. Their ensuing “synchromies”
were some of the first abstract non-objective paintings
in American art.
Following from: John Ashbury, Dictionary of Modern
Painting
Born in New York of French and English parents; died in
Broomall, Pennsylvania. After studies with Robert Henri
he came to France at the age of nineteen, where he met Matisse,
Apollinaire, Modigliani (who painted his portrait) and Leo
Stein, who encouraged him and helped him financially. But
his most decisive meeting was with Stanton MacDonald Wright
with whom he founded the movement known as ‘Synchromism.’
Russell’s Synchromie en Vert at the Salon des Indépendants
in 1913 was the first Synchromist work to be shown;
Synchromist exhibitions followed in the same year in Munich,
New York and Paris. In 1916 Russell went to New York
for a month to Exhibition at the Anderson Galleries. Back
in France he shortly lost interest in Synchromism, adopting
a classical and it must be said conventional figurative
style. Occasionally, however, he reverted to abstraction.
A canvas in the collection of Michel Seuphor dating from
1925 is in the best Synchromist tradition. Except
for several winters in Rome and a trip to California in
1931 where he showed his work at the Palace of Legion
Honor in San Francisco, he remained in France from 1916
to 1946, mostly on his small property at Aigremont
in Burgundy, where he led a solitary existence following
the death of his first wife. In 1946 he returned
to America with his second wife, a niece of Claude Monet.
Deeply religious, he painted a number of large-scale Biblical
works in severe classical style during his last years, and
spoke of his early abstractions as belonging to his ‘kindergarten
period.’
It is the Synchromist works, however, which merit his inclusion
here. Russell’s work, while closely related to that
of MacDonald-Wright, is less suave and harmonious, more
abrupt and inhabited by a rude strength,’avec des details
crus et cruels’ (Michael Seuphor). Rough-hewn geometrical
shapes, often trapezoidal, are crammed and crumpled into
a kinetic image, which contrasts with the lyrical undulations
of form in the work of his colleague. Writing on his work
in the catalogue of the 1913 Sychromist exhibition
at the Galerie Bernhein-Jeune, Russell said: ‘I have
used light as a series of related chromatic undulations
and have studied more profoundly the harmonic rapports between
colours…As is evident, I give up the heritage of old
drawing habits. Instead I run the happy risk of falling
on some of the correspondences that exist between reality
and our colour that form should gush out. From this point
of view my art is related to the very mechanisms of natural
vision.’
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