Macdonald-Wright, Stanton

Macdonald-Wright, Stanton (1890–1973). American painter, designer, experimental artist, teacher, administrator, and writer, remembered chiefly as a pioneer of abstract art. He was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, moved to California as a child, and entered the Art Students League of Los Angeles in 1905. In 1907 he moved to Paris, where he studied briefly at the Académie Colarossi, the Académie Julian, and the École des Beaux-Arts. He met Morgan Russell in 1911 and together they evolved Synchromism—a style of painting based on the abstract use of colour. They first exhibited their works in this style in 1913 and claimed that they, rather than Delaunay and Kupka (whose work of the time was very similar), were the originators of a new type of abstract art. In 1914–16 Macdonald-Wright lived in London, where he helped his brother, the critic Willard Huntington Wright, with his book Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning (1916). He returned to the USA in 1916, living first in New York, and then from 1919 in California. By this time he had abandoned Synchromism for a more traditional representational style. From 1922 to 1930 he was director of the Art Students League of Los Angeles, and from 1935 to 1942 he worked for the Federal Art Project, in which capacity he invented a material called Petrachrome for the decoration of walls. He was also involved in other types of experimental work, including colour processes for motion pictures (he was interested in the theatre as well as cinema, writing satires and designing sets for the Santa Monica Theater Guild). In 1937 he visited Japan, and from 1942 to 1952 he taught Oriental and modern art at the University of California at Los Angeles. After a second visit to Japan in 1952–3 he gave up teaching and devoted himself full-time to painting, working in a suave, colourful, abstract style that was at times close to his early Synchromism. Some of his best work was done in this late stage of his career. From 1958 he spent part of every year in a Zen monastery in Japan.