6
The Cross-dresser

Benton’s hasty departure from Paris was not only humiliating but had deep artistic consequences. As a result of this abrupt removal, Benton’s forward development as a modernist was abruptly halted. Had he stayed in Paris, Benton would surely have played a role in the development of Synchromism, the modernist movement that Russell and Macdonald-Wright unleashed on the world in the spring of 1913. Instead, he did not learn about Synchromism until 1914, when Macdonald-Wright returned to New York to introduce Americans to the new style. Just about everything of significance that Benton passed on to Jackson Pollock was based in some way on Synchromism. For this reason, it’s worth making a brief digression to describe what Benton missed when he left Paris—the contacts with Matisse and Picasso, the exhibitions of Futurism and Orphism, and above all to describe the birth of Synchromism and its place in the history of modern art.

A good place to start is with the biography of Macdonald-Wright’s partner, Morgan Russell. While Macdonald-Wright eventually moved ahead of his partner, in the early days of their association Russell was the artistic leader. Indeed, Russell later insisted, with some plausibility, that Synchromism was his invention and that he included Macdonald-Wright in the first Synchromist exhibition only because he needed help to pay for the costs of staging the exhibition and publishing catalogues and posters. Thus, it was Russell who initiated the flood of artistic and intellectual forces that later rippled on to Macdonald-Wright, to Benton, and to Pollock.

If Macdonald-Wright was, to use Benton’s words, a “psychological oddity,” Morgan Russell was one to an even greater degree, for reasons that likewise stretched far back into childhood. But if Macdonald-Wright’s childhood was pampered, spoiled, and indulged, Russell’s was strangely bleak. Not merely economically impoverished, it was a strange, loveless emotional zero as well—not so much a dry desert as an utter vacuum. In his inner soul the unsettling emptiness of Russell’s childhood never left him, and in some odd way it seems to have impelled both his astonishingly rapid progress to the center stage of modern art and his bewildered retreat once success and fame were seemingly within his grasp.

An only child, Morgan Russell was born on January 25, 1886, on Christopher Street in New York City. His father, Charles Jean Russell, an architect, died when he was nine. Three years later his mother, Miner Antoinette Russell, remarried, and at this time she broke off all communication both with her own family and with the Russells. Consequently, other than his strained relationship with his mother and his stepfather, Morgan Russell grew up without contact with family members of any sort. His mother’s new husband, Charles Otis Morgan, took no interest in his stepson and even resented the burden of providing room and board. Around the age of sixteen Russell left home and began supporting himself with menial jobs, such as working in restaurants.

No doubt a major reason for Russell’s poor treatment was that his family was not wealthy and providing him with money was difficult for them, but even so the way he was cast off by his mother and stepfather seems not simply heartless but psychologically peculiar. The final break came in December 1909, when Russell was just twenty-three and living in Paris. His mother died of pneumonia in New York, and Russell did not return home to attend her funeral. After that date his stepfather ceased to answer his letters, leaving him completely on his own. Ingratiating and good-looking, in a somewhat feminine way, Russell developed a talent for finding people who would provide financial help and become foster parents of a sort. By 1902, when he was sixteen, Russell began rooming with the sculptor Arthur Lee, who remained his companion and helpmate for the next four or five years. He also began posing in the nude as a model for James Earle Fraser’s sculpture class at the Art Students League, an activity that introduced him to artists and the activities of artists, as well as to his future patron, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, one of Fraser’s students. In 1906, when Arthur Lee went to study in Paris, Russell decided to accompany him, and by this time he had resolved to become a painter and sculptor himself.

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The leader of the formative phase of Synchromism was Morgan Russell, who took up first sculpture and then painting after supporting himself as an artist’s model. (Photographer unknown, Morgan Russell Posing as a Model [c. 1907]. Montclair Art Museum, Morgan Russell Archives.)

Along with abandoning her son, Russell’s mother left emotional scars of another sort. Russell was a cross-dresser. As is typical of cross-dressers, this ritual seems to have been inspired by the way he was disciplined as a child: when he was a little boy his mother put him in women’s clothes when he misbehaved. In a chronology of his life, Russell noted of the year 1890, when he was four, “Mother put dresses on me as a punishment.” His next reference to such an action is for 1895, when he was nine, when he was “put in skirts for a week as punishment.” Interestingly, 1895 was the year his father died, so this discipline must have painfully confused a fragile sense of male identity already threatened by the loss of a father figure.

“The day I was put into skirts by my mother for once and all,” he later wrote, “is as vivid to me after all these years as it was at the time.” She first pulled off his boy’s clothes—his shirt, long trousers, underwear—and then layered him in girl’s clothing: a long white chemise, a tightly laced corset, elaborately flounced and beribboned drawers, a flounced petticoat with lace, another petticoat made of taffeta, a high-necked shirt, which she buttoned at the back so that he could not remove it, and a heavy long skirt, which she fastened with a belt—saying as she did this, “There—you will never get out of these for the rest of your life.” As his mother did this, Russell later recalled, he could feel that her actions “drowned all masculinity from me.” But while shamed, he also felt a sense of pleasure. As he later wrote, “The sensation of the long and voluminous petticoats against my bare legs was a mixture of delight and strange troubling sensation.” The moment became a defining one in setting Russell’s personal identity, for he began to feel excitement in thinking of it and discovered that “I feel the same emotion when recalling it as I felt when it took place.” Although this cross-dressing began as a form of chastisement, by the time he was in his teens Russell found that dressing in skirts gave him a peculiar but definite sense of exhilaration.

The Circle of Gertrude Stein

Morgan Russell’s rise from a busboy in restaurants to a major figure in modern art was exceptionally quick: he made his very first painting in 1907 at the age of twenty-one and was a major figure of modern art by 1913, when he was twenty-six. Such rapid artistic progress from obscurity to fame in just five years surely owed something to Russell’s innate talent, but it also surely reflected Russell’s exceptional good luck in arriving in Paris at what was arguably the most important juncture in the history of modern art. At the moment when Russell arrived in France, controversy about Matisse and the Fauves (or “Wild Beasts”) was at its height, the moment when Cubism was being born. Matisse had just scandalized Paris with his Blue Nude, and Picasso, in response, was creating his Demoiselles d’Avignon, the single most famous painting of modern art. Remarkably, Russell got to the center of all this almost immediately. Within a week or so of his arrival in Paris, Russell made his way to the home of Gertrude Stein.

If any single figure could be termed the mother of modern art it would surely be Gertrude Stein. Fat, Jewish, and lesbian, all qualities that might have driven her toward a feeling of being outcast or ill at ease, she achieved a Buddha-like serenity and became an iconic figure of the modern age. But she had one notable advantage, inherited wealth. Gertrude’s father was a merchant and speculator who developed the cable car system in San Francisco. One night he died in his sleep, and as Gertrude put it in her memoir, “Then our life without a father began, a very pleasant one.”

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With a fortune made in San Francisco cable cars, Leo, Gertrude, and Michael Stein settled in Paris, where they became the major patrons of Picasso, Matisse, and other leading figures of modern art. Morgan Russell made his way to Gertrude’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus within a few weeks of his arrival in France. (Photographer unknown, “The Stein Corporation”: Leo, Gertrude and Michael Stein. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University.)

Gertrude’s older brother Leo was the figure who led the family to Paris and began collecting modern art. Once purchased, the paintings were hung helter-skelter in their studio at the rue de Fleurus—first a single row of paintings, then double-hanging, and finally hung floor to ceiling, with as many as four or five paintings on top of each other. Soon the Steins’ salon had become one of the principal gathering places in Paris.

Some writers say that the Steins were not really wealthy. Perhaps, but they had enough money so that they did not have to work and could rent a large house in Paris with an adjacent studio, have a cook and servants, eat well, entertain friends, travel when they chose, indulge their hobbies, and still have money left over for buying paintings. To be sure, they did not rank high in the echelons of the rich. They were able to buy paintings by Matisse and Picasso when they were cheap, generally not more than a hundred dollars or so, but as prices rose they were unable to keep up and dropped out of the competition. Their best purchases were made early on for modest sums.

When I met him at his apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, the Kansas City–born composer Virgil Thomson, who knew Gertrude Stein well, remarked to me that the key to understanding her was to realize that she was fundamentally self-centered. Somewhat paradoxically, this was what made her the greatest gatherer of artistic talent of the modern age. Other salons in Paris had formal dress codes and a strict sense of social ritual; the Steins socialized in a way that was American and informal. Just about anyone could show up, with or without an introduction, to stare at the strange modern paintings and to mingle with the other guests—artists, writers, dancers, eccentrics, and gawkers. Russell had no trouble entering the enclave, and he seems to have made an unusually strong impression on Gertrude, perhaps because something about his sexual ambiguity attracted her. She made him the subject of one of her first “word portraits,” in which she speculated on whether he would achieve greatness.

Matisse and Rodin

One way of thinking of Synchromism is to view it as a synopsis of what had happened in modern art between 1909 (when Russell arrived in Paris) and 1914 (when the first Synchromist exhibition was staged). Essentially, Russell synthesized the most radical and exciting artistic developments of this period. It is convenient to think of this as a four-step process.

1. Matisse and Rodin

When Russell arrived in Paris, Matisse was at the peak of his influence at the rue de Fleurus, and in April 1909 Russell entered Matisse’s art class, which had been formed just a few months earlier at the insistence of Gertrude’s sister-in-law Sarah Stein. Those who met Matisse were generally surprised. The wild beast of modern art turned out to be a solemn, dignified man, who dressed in a conservative suit, like a banker, and had the somewhat pompous verbal manner of a college professor. But to some extent this seems to have been a ruse, since Matisse’s demeanor grew increasingly bourgeois as his art grew stranger and wilder.

The key to understanding Russell as a modern artist—as well as those affected by his ideas, through a long chain of influence—is to grasp that his outlook on modern art was primarily shaped by Matisse. The influence of Matisse, however, had a surprising aspect, since unlike most of Matisse’s students, who focused on painting, Russell concentrated on sculpture. Matisse is so famous as a painter that it is easy to forget that, along with Picasso, he was arguably one of the two greatest sculptors of the twentieth century. What is more, sculpture played a key role in shaping Matisse’s development as a painter. After years of unavailing struggle, Matisse took up sculpture in 1899, and in the process of mastering the medium his painting was transformed. The period in which he focused intently on sculpture is also the period in which he moved to the forefront of modern art.

When he took up sculpture, Matisse’s reference point was the work of Auguste Rodin. Indeed, his first statues were not only closely based on precedents by Rodin but were made from Rodin’s model César Pignatelli (nicknamed Bevilacqua) under the guidance of Rodin’s studio assistant Antoine Bourdelle. At the time, Rodin’s work was technically innovative. Dismissing conventional, classical notions of the human form, he faithfully followed and slightly exaggerated the irregularities of the human body, following its alternation of what he described as “lumps and holes.”

In essence, Rodin had discarded a regularized sense of visual rhythm for one that was more alive, more vital, more unpredictable. This complex rhythm of hollows and bumps, which expressed the tension and relaxation of muscles, was then extended to the composition as a whole. Matisse took up this idea but employed it even more boldly than Rodin. Whereas Rodin liked to exploit the play of light on the surface of the sculpture, Matisse employed rougher surfaces and directed attention to the blocky masses of the composition as a whole. Ultimately, Rodin’s concept of “lumps and holes,” words roughly equivalent to “the hollow and the bump,” was the source of the rhythm in Jackson Pollock’s work, through a chain of influence that started when Russell studied sculpture with Matisse.

Two closely related works by Matisse, both made in 1906–7, provide the key to Russell’s whole development as an artist. Russell saw them both within weeks of his arrival in Paris in 1908. One was a statue, Reclining Nude, Aurora, the other a painting, Blue Nude—the most talked-about and controversial painting in the Salon des Independents of 1907. The two pieces are closely related, essentially translations of the same conception into different media. Matisse first undertook his sculpture of Aurora, but after weeks of work, when the piece was nearly finished, it slipped off a table and its head was broken off. Emotionally traumatized, he set aside his work in clay and rapidly painted the Blue Nude, in which he dramatized the twists and turns of the figure with bold brushwork and strange colors. When that was complete, he went back and completed his statuette. Both creations were acquired by members of the Stein family: the Blue Nude was acquired by Gertrude and Leo, the Aurora by Sarah. In both pieces, Matisse explored the idea of contrapposto and serpentine movement.

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The rough, almost brutal modeling of Matisse’s first major piece of sculpture, The Slave (c. 1900–06, left), was derived from works by Rodin, such as Jean d’Aire (1885, right). Matisse worked from Rodin’s former model Pignatelli, under the guidance of Rodin’s former studio assistant Antoine Bourdelle. (Left: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mr. and Mrs. Sam Salz Fund. © 2009 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Photographer unknown, statue now in the Rodin Museum, Meudon.)

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Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907, top) simplified the twists of the human figure used by Michelangelo in a fashion influenced by African sculpture. (Top: The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland. © 2009 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography by Mitro Hood. Bottom: Night [1520–34], the Medici Chapel, Florence.)

Contrapposto can be traced back to ancient Greece and was perfected and codified by Polykleitos of Argos, a sculptor of the fifth century B.C., in his statue The Spear Bearer. In its fundamentals the idea of contrapposto is very simple. Rather than showing the figure with weight equally on both feet, you put the weight more heavily on one. This instantly creates a very different sense of visual rhythm. Instead of a symmetrical arrangement, it creates a sense of surprise and irregularity, although there is a strict logic to the alternation of tense and relaxed muscles, of compressed and extended forms. Nothing is completely regular, but when done well there is a perfect sense of balance. Since people normally stand with their weight more heavily on one foot than the other, the visual effect looks completely lifelike, as opposed to the old flat-footed way of rendering the figure, which looks wooden and stiff. Developing contrapposto was the key to developing the classical style of Greek art, which still looks natural and convincing to us even today and which we still use as one of our key reference points when we look for an ideal of human beauty.

Since the weight is not even, contrapposto generally entails an element of twisting. The figure starts to become a spiral, since the torso is not squarely aligned with the hips but slightly turned. In the late Renaissance the sculptor Michelangelo became fascinated with this effect. He found that by exaggerating these twists he could not only render muscles in visually memorable and exciting ways but could create a powerful emotional effect of extraordinary tension. Renderings of this type are often described as the figura serpentina—the serpentine figure. Essentially, Michelangelo intensified and exaggerated the device the Greeks had discovered, to create the greatest possible tension and emotional power, and he also applied it to a greater variety of poses.

Matisse’s Aurora and Blue Nude both employ the ancient principles of contrapposto and serpentine movement but radically simplify the figure in a fashion influenced by African sculpture. Thus, there are no distractions of surface or detail to take away from the energy of the effect: the paintings endow these principles with a brutal force that feels modern and new. Russell was obviously fascinated and impressed by what Matisse had achieved, and he clearly studied under Matisse with this end in mind. To provide guidance, Matisse instructed Russell to carefully study not his own work but a piece in the Louvre that had been one of his principal sources of inspiration, Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. Made for the never-finished tomb of Pope Julius II, The Dying Slave was conceived as a caryatid, or supporting figure for heavy blocks of stone piled on top of it. Its pose is one that has since become standard for girlie pictures, with the hand behind the head and the elbow bent. Such a stance not only creates a beautiful line but twists the whole figure in a provocative way, emphasizing all its sensual aspects.

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Morgan Russell used Cubist effects (right) to intensify the dynamism of the twists in Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave. (Left: The Dying Slave [c. 1514–16]. The Louvre, Paris. Right: Study for “Synchromy in Green” [c.1912–13], Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, gift of Rose Fried.)

This was a piece that fascinated French artists of this period—Rodin, Degas, Cézanne, and Picasso all made sculpture or paintings based on it. Matisse even owned a small replica of The Dying Slave, which appears in a painting of 1923, Checker Game and Piano Music, where it appears on top of a dresser. Russell also became obsessed with The Dying Slave, and his chief accomplishment while working with Matisse was a blocky sculpture based on it, which simplified its rhythms in a vaguely Assyrian fashion.

2. Cézanne and Picasso

In short, while studying with Matisse, Russell was introduced to many of the major themes of his career: among them the human figure in contrapposto and the idea that a unifying rhythm should run through the entire composition. But then, around the winter of 1910, Russell had a series of crises. For one thing, at this time Matisse fell out of favor with Gertrude Stein (who had shifted her patronage to Picasso) and was so emotionally bruised that he closed his school. Thus, Russell lost his major teacher and mentor. In addition, Russell experienced a financial crisis, which was only resolved when he attached himself to Macdonald-Wright. During this difficult period Russell shifted from sculpture to painting, perhaps in part because painting was less expensive than sculpture and could be accomplished in a smaller studio, and also no doubt because by taking up painting he was able to strengthen his emotional bond with Macdonald-Wright.

At this point Russell became fascinated by two artists who had explored new approaches to modeling form: Cézanne, who used warm and cool colors to suggest projection and recession, and Picasso, who used lines and cubes to analyze sculptural relationships and to create a new rhythmic dynamism.

Not surprisingly, Russell’s starting point was Cézanne, an artist whom Matisse admired and collected and who intensely interested both Benton and Macdonald-Wright, who were earnestly churning out imitations of his work. Cézanne came to the fore in this period, since he seemed to offer a means of using color as a constructive element. When he applied color, Cézanne did so with reference to spatial position, often organizing his paintings around the interplay between warm and cool—that is, using warm colors such as orange to indicate advancing surfaces and cool colors such as blue to articulate retreating ones. Every brushstroke seems to express a tension between an effort to record an optical sensation and an effort to weave these scattered sensations into a larger pictorial and geometric unity.

Russell’s notebooks of 1910 are filled with references to Cézanne and to studies after his work. Indeed, in 1910 Russell and his friend Andrew Dasburg borrowed a Cézanne oil study of five apples from Leo Stein, in order to copy it and absorb Cézanne’s methods. As Dasburg later commented, “Morgan copied it in an analytic way whereas I copied it literally.”

Russell’s interest in Cézanne soon led forward to an interest in the Cubism of Picasso. At this point we enter a potentially treacherous arena, for Cubism is one of the most complex and bewildering of twentieth-century movements. What is now termed Cubism is actually a succession of different styles, each of which works on slightly different principles and explores reality from the vantage point of different assumptions. Explaining any one of these phases is a challenging task, but our work will be greatly simplified if we content ourselves with looking at what Russell learned from Cubism, rather than seeking to fully comprehend what Cubism was really all about. In fact, what Russell took was relatively simple: the idea of cubes, or at least of some sort of simplified, box-like volume, which helps to define the geometric character of a space. Most of what Russell learned from Picasso he learned from a single painting of 1908–9, Three Women (now in the Hermitage), generally considered, along with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as one of the two most important early Cubist paintings. In 1911 Three Women hung at the rue de Fleurus in the collection of Gertrude Stein. It was arguably the most significant painting by Picasso in her collection, and without question the largest—it is nearly seven feet tall. There it attracted the attention of Russell, who copied it in a careful pencil sketch, reproducing the scaffolding of the design. It is the only painting by Picasso that he copied so carefully, and while he certainly saw many of Picasso’s other works, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that everything he took from Picasso in developing Synchromism was derived from this single canvas.

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Through copying Picasso’s Three Women, then owned by Gertrude Stein, Morgan Russell learned two fundamental tricks of Synchromism: the fracturing of form into cubic shapes and the use of pie-shapes to create spiraling pinwheel rhythms. (Study after Picasso’s “Three Women” [c. 1911]. Montclair Art Museum, Morgan Russell Archives.)

The painting employs shapes similar to wedges of pie, which are piled one on top of another to create a rhythmic sequence of volumes, somewhat like the successive steps of a spiral staircase. Russell was clearly fascinated by this effect, and in the sketch in which he copied Picasso’s canvas he brought it out. In two notebooks of 1911, Russell pursued the rhythmic structure of the painting further, sketching figures in an S-curve and then dividing these figures into wedge-like divisions, again shaped rather like slices of pie. By this time, Russell clearly recognized that such pie shapes were not only a useful analytical tool but had a formal beauty in their own right. Essentially, he realized that Picasso’s method could be used to dramatize the sort of spiral rhythm that he loved in The Dying Slave. Indeed, one could intensify the sense of dynamic movement by making the figure more abstract.

3. Futurism and Orphism

By this time movements of modern art were starting to sprout up with some regularity, and the techniques for creating a new movement were starting to fall into a formula. Shortly after copying the painting by Picasso, Russell attended two exhibitions that had a major impact on his thinking and served a role as catalysts for the birth of Synchromism. The first was a show of Futurism, the second one of Orphism.

Futurism had started as a manifesto by the poet Filippo Marinetti proclaiming the necessity of smashing everything old and creating a new manly culture based on machines, speed, and modernity. Remarkably, Marinetti published his manifesto before the Futurist painters—Boccioni, Carra, Russolo, and Severini—had actually developed a new artistic style. But they did so shortly afterward, devising a visual language that was similar to Cubism but focused not on still life but on trains, cars, speed, and movement—that is to say, dynamic subjects expressive of the new machine age. Their most significant visual innovation was the device of “lines of force,” which expressed energy rather than the physical object. On February 5, 1912, the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery opened the first show of Futurism to be staged in France. “Everybody was excited,” Stein wrote of the event, and “everybody went.” One of these visitors was Russell. He carefully saved the catalogue for the show and eventually gathered copies of more than twenty Futurist publications.

Only three weeks after the Futurist show opened, on February 28, Robert Delaunay staged an exhibition of a new style called Orphism at the Galleries Barbazanges in Paris. Like the Futurists, he used a Cubist language of form, focused on subjects expressive of modern life (such as the Eiffel Tower), and employed brighter colors than the original Cubists. The title of Delaunay’s movement came from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who thought that his work had something to do with orphic mysteries.

In fact, the lessons of the two exhibitions, that of Futurism and that of Orphism, were curiously similar: they amounted to a formula for making modern art. From the visual standpoint, make Cubism a bit jazzier through the use of modern subject and bright color; from the promotional standpoint, rent a gallery, print up some posters, and write a manifesto, or get a friend to do so.

4. Percyval Tudor-Hart and His Color Theories

The stage was clearly set for a new movement of modern art. But what would it be? The key to developing Synchromism lay in a new artistic influence, the teachings of a Canadian painter (thoroughly obscure today) named Percyval Tudor-Hart (1873–1954). Russell discovered him first and then brought Macdonald-Wright to his classes. Tudor-Hart’s own paintings are remarkably conservative in approach. His teaching focused on coordinating disparate parts into a larger system of unity. He was particularly obsessed with the most unruly element in painting, color, and sought to somehow control it by applying principles drawn from the most disciplined, mathematical and abstract of art forms, classical music. Russell and Macdonald-Wright both took classes with Tudor-Hart in 1911, shortly after they met, and it was by joining Tudor-Hart’s theories with all that they had absorbed from French modern art that they came up with the style of painting they christened Synchromism. Russell’s breakthrough came when he recognized that sequences of color, arranged in chords according to Tudor-Hart’s color system, could be used to dramatize the twists and turns of the human figure that he had focused on in his study of the work of Picasso and Matisse. Color, in short, could be used to enhance and etherealize the sensation of muscular rhythm.

For nearly ninety years, writers on Synchromism, including myself, did not have a clear grasp of what the movement was really all about, in particular, what Russell and Macdonald-Wright were doing with their arrangements of color. Fortunately, a few years ago the mystery was solved by a young scholar, Will South, who took the trouble to locate one of the rarest publications in the history of modern art, Macdonald-Wright’s A Treatise on Color, privately printed in Los Angeles in 1924. Since the color plates were made by hand, with pigments carefully mixed by the author himself, only sixty copies of this book were fabricated, with a handmade box, most of which have simply disappeared. I must confess that I have never seen an original, only a grainy photocopy, although fortunately South has reproduced the color plates in an exhibition catalogue on the work of Macdonald-Wright’s career, and this makes it possible to follow the argument of Wright’s text. With its help one can finally understand the principles of the Synchromist use of color and color relationships; and due to this knowledge we now know that Synchromism was in fact quite different from Orphism, although in ways that are somewhat complicated and strange. Tudor-Hart believed that color harmony was precisely analogous to musical harmony. He thus redesigned the color wheel of Newton to express this relationship. Rather than the seven colors of Newton’s wheel, Tudor-Hart created a color wheel with twelve colors, the same number as that of the notes of the Western musical scale, which has twelve tones—seven whole notes and five sharps and flats.

Traditional color wheels make harmonious “chords” of color by selecting equidistant intervals. In music, however, harmonious chords are not formed with equidistant notes but with firsts, thirds, and fifths. Tudor-Hart felt that harmonious color chords should use the same intervals. Thus, to make a painting according to the system devised by Tudor-Hart and employed by Russell and Macdonald-Wright, the artist followed the following three-step procedure:

  1. Using the color wheel, with its colors divided into twelve “notes,” the artist chooses a “tonic” color, which will be the starting point of his “scale” and will determine all the other colors he employs.

  2. Starting with that color, the painter then creates a scale by going up (or around) the color wheel, using the intervals of Western music—that is, whole step, whole step, half-step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half-step. Thus, for example, the scale starting with red would run: red, orange, yellow, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet.

  3. To create a color chord equivalent to a tonic chord, select the first, third, and fifth intervals of the scale. A color chord for the scale of red, for example, would consist of red, yellow, and blue-green.

Essentially—at least in theory—carrying out these steps made it possible to create an overall scheme of color harmony, so that every “note” of color had a relationship to every other note within a harmonically calibrated system. This much would have been quite complicated on its own, but Russell and Macdonald-Wright then added another variable—that of warm and cool colors, which helped to indicate spatial position, in a fashion similar to the work of Cézanne.

On paper the Synchromist system sounds mechanical and relatively easy. Just carry out step one, step two, and step three and you’re all set. In practice it turns out to be maddeningly difficult. The system works up to a point and then seems to dissolve into chaos. One of the major problems is that in music the sequence of notes is strictly linear and controlled, whereas in painting the placement of colors does not follow an orderly pathway. Our eye can scan a painting in any direction, and as a consequence it’s not possible for a painter to specify the exact sequence of color notes that the viewer will be tracing.

Russell and Macdonald-Wright tried to wiggle around this problem by arranging colors in a sort of sinuous ladder. When one looks at the painting, one’s eyes are supposed to run up and down this ladder, playing the color notes in the right order. Even this scheme, however, is not quite foolproof. To make an interesting composition, the ladder needs to lead out in different directions. Making the major sequence of colors is not too difficult, but what should one do with the secondary shapes and with the background elements, and with all the color units that don’t form part of the main sequence of notes? Because the possible visual pathways are so numerous, Russell and Macdonald-Wright tended to handle the process most logically at the upper end of the scale, then to become more confused as they moved into the distance.

It should be noted that today scientists accept almost none of Syn-chromist color theory as true. Color and sound are processed by quite different physiological mechanisms and are hardly equivalent. Even the Synchromist procedure for making harmonious color chords is questionable. While Russell and Macdonald-Wright liked to work with sequences such as thirds and fifths, other color systems based on quite different intervals seem to work equally well and to be equally harmonious.

The most that can be said in defense of Synchromism is that a graduated system of intervals, whether of hue (that is, color), gradation (that is, degree of light or dark), or saturation (that is, the purity of a color) can be used to express a sequence. If this sequence is tuned or calibrated with another variable, such as position in space, it does clarify or assert relationships in a way that most viewers can grasp instinctively, without elaborate explanation.

Notably, the sequences that the Synchromists explored were those of the turns and twists, the hollows and bumps, of the human figure. In fact, Matisse’s instruction to study The Dying Slave, and to do so very carefully, provided the basis for Russell’s entire career as a Synchromist. While studying under Matisse, Russell made a blocky piece of sculpture inspired by Michelangelo’s figure, and this sculpture in turn became the subject of Russell’s first full-fledged Synchromist painting, Synchromy in Green of 1912–13. As he developed as a Synchromist, Russell repeatedly went back to The Dying Slave itself, analyzing its rhythms of form through sequences of color. Many of Russell’s paintings initially look like pure abstractions, but when we trace carefully his working process we discover that ultimately they all go back to The Dying Slave, and to its spiraling rhythmic movement. Thus, ultimately, while he enhanced the effect with prismatic colors, Russell’s paintings are explorations of the principle of “the hollow and the bump” that he had learned from Matisse and Rodin. Hollow and bump—the same principle that Benton passed on to Jackson Pollock. A carefully treasured formula, quietly passed from one great artist to another.