Russell’s creative bursts, as well as his emotional breakdowns, seem to have corresponded in some way with his bursts of cross-dressing. Interestingly, in the months after he visited the exhibitions of Futurism and Orphism, Russell did not paint very much but simply made rough sketches in his notebooks. He also wore male clothing. He had gone into some phase of hibernation or gestation. By the spring of 1912, however, he had begun to plan some of his major Synchromist paintings. A notebook of May 1912, for example, contains a small diagram of what became Synchromy in Blue-Violet in 1913. Following the progression of his sketches is quite informative, since we can follow step by step how he moved from fairly straightforward studies of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave to more and more abstract and generalized attempts to reproduce its essential rhythm.
By the end of 1912 Russell had begun making major paintings—the most important of his career—and he had also discarded his male clothes and turned to dressing like a woman. “Winter commenced life in petticoats,” he noted in his journal. Russell’s achievement of this period can be largely summed up through two ambitious paintings completed in 1913, Synchromy in Green and Synchromy in Blue-Violet, which reveal how he progressed, with surprising speed, from a slightly modulated form of realism to the verge of pure abstraction.
Synchromy in Green was a fairly realistic studio scene. While the objects were rendered in a fractured manner, reminiscent of Cubism, it’s not hard to recognize them: a still life, a woman at a table, a piano, and three pieces of sculpture. All these elements have a didactic significance and allude to the sources that Russell was drawing on to produce his new synthesis of dynamic form, color, and music. The three sculptures—all works by Russell—pay homage to Michelangelo and his principles of spiraling muscular rhythm. (One of the sculptures is quite similar to Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, on which it was based.) The three apples on the table refer to Cézanne, who made still-life paintings of apples and who demonstrated that color could be used constructively, to enhance the sensation of form. The piano with sheet music alludes to the idea that painting should become like music and that colors should be arranged in scales and chords. The woman reading a book is probably Gertrude Stein, who, as has been noted, wrote a “portrait” of Russell during this period. Russell surely wanted to pay tribute to her role as a supporter and friend of modern art, and very likely he hoped that if he portrayed her she would purchase the painting.
Sadly, Synchromy in Green has disappeared: we know its appearance only from a reproduction in the catalogue of the first Synchromist exhibition. Essentially, Russell used Cubist fracturing of form as a kind of analytical tool, to bring out the twists and turns of the figure in space more forcefully than in a naturalistic rendering. Unfortunately, since the catalogue photograph was in black and white, it’s not possible to reconstruct exactly how Russell employed color in the painting, although the effect was clearly prismatic and brilliant. When the painting was first exhibited, a writer for the New York Times described its impact as “astonishing” and noted that it was painted “in the strongest possible tones.”
In short, Synchromy in Green was a sort of demonstration piece, which didactically laid out how Cubism and color theory could be combined to give new energy to ancient principles of contrapposto and rhythmic movement, as they had been developed by Michelangelo and others. For all its ambition, the painting had an additive quality, as if Russell had simply glued together a series of smaller still-life and figure studies to create a larger composition. Within a year, however, Russell went on to produce a piece that is both better integrated as a design and far more radical in conception: Synchromy in Blue-Violet.
More than ten feet high and seven wide, Synchromy in Blue-Violet was an ambitious project, which Russell developed through a series of careful studies. Even today it impresses one as a startling and original conception, and Russell himself always regarded it as his most important painting. In two respects the canvas shows an advance over Synchromy in Green. First, the composition has been strengthened and simplified. A fan-like pattern radiates like a pulse of pure energy from the lower right corner up toward the upper left: thus, the effect is completely unified and has none of the additive quality of the earlier work. Second, and perhaps even more significant, it is far more abstract. Russell’s early sketches for the Synchromy in Blue-Violet show that its origins were figural and, as before, based on Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. But in the final design the anatomical references have almost disappeared. We are no longer looking at a collection of still-life and figural studies: the subject (and technique) has become larger and more powerful. What began as an expression of muscular torsion has been translated into a statement about the universe as a whole, in which color plays a powerful expressive role as a means of dematerializing matter into something akin to “spirit.”
In fact, Russell clearly conceived the piece as a mystical and religious statement. To make this evident, when he first exhibited
the painting in Paris at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, under the title in the catalogue he cited the famous lines from the Book
of Genesis:
Then God said: ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from
the darkness.
In short, the subject of the painting is not just the human figure but something more cosmic. In a letter to Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney, Russell went on to explain:
The bursting of the central spectrum in my picture on one’s consciousness has surely a vague analogy with what must have happened
if one can imagine the first visual organ as belonging to a conscious being. If modern painting is to express anything greater
than a few apples or portraits it can only be something of this sort.
While not very clearly written, Russell’s statement seems to indicate that the ultimate theme he sought to capture was the moment of first creation, when awareness of existence flooded into human consciousness like a burst of colored light.
At this point we come to some tricky questions of definition. Should we consider Russell’s painting as figurative or abstract?
In fact, seeing these terms as dichotomies may not be correct. The painting does contain some vestiges of figural qualities,
but these have been translated into something that is no longer literal but symbolic. Muscular form has been converted into
a cosmic form of energy—that is, into something abstract. And if we accept the idea that Synchromy in Blue-Violet was essentially abstract, then it marked an important step in the history of modern art, since it was the first truly abstract
painting ever exhibited in Paris. Essentially—as Pollock was to do later—Russell had abstracted from the rhythms of the human
body, from the alternation of hollow and bump, to create a design that expressed the larger rhythms of the cosmos and that
fused these rhythms into a vision of ecstasy.
Scandalizing Paris
As Russell and Macdonald-Wright surely intended, Synchromism began stirring up controversy, even before the work was exhibited. Early in 1913 Robert Delaunay and his wife, Sonia, the creators of Orphism, got word that two brash young Americans were making paintings with bright colors. Convinced that Russell and Macdonald-Wright were stealing his ideas, Robert approached Stanton in a café and inquired, “So what is this Syn-chromism business all about?” “It would take a man of intelligence to understand,” Macdonald-Wright coolly replied, and a brawl ensued.
In March 1913 Morgan Russell showed Synchromy in Green at the annual Salon des Independents, the first public exhibition of a Synchromist painting, as well as the first use of the term “Synchromy,” which he (or Macdonald-Wright) had coined from Greek words meaning “with color.” As noted, the canvas was striking enough to merit mention in the New York Times. Within two months, Synchromism had blossomed into a movement.
On June 1 Russell and Macdonald-Wright opened the first Syn-chromist exhibition in Munich, with a catalogue and the inevitable manifesto. They seem to have conceived the event as a sort of practice session, an out-of-town tryout, for the show they had booked for two months later in Paris. Four paintings were reproduced in the catalogue, none of which can be located today: Russell’s Synchromy in Green, Macdonald-Wright’s Portrait of Jean Dracopoli, and two back views of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, one by each artist.
To a large degree the paintings were upstaged by their catalogue statement, most likely written by Macdonald-Wright. Its inflammatory tone was borrowed from “The Futurist Manifesto.” Although titled “In Explanation of Synchromism,” in actual fact it didn’t explain very much. It was largely an indictment of other artists and movements, such as the Impressionists, who were “mediocre,” the Cubists, who were “by no means more successful in their attempts than the Impressionists,” and the Futurists, who were “naïve.” As was intended, the show stirred up intense interest: five thousand copies of the catalogue were gone by the second day of the exhibition, and all the hand-colored posters were stolen from the kiosks.
In October the second Synchromist exhibition opened at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris. Once again, the catalogue insulted nearly everyone. Picasso was described as a vulgarizer of Cézanne; the Delaunays (for the first time acknowledged as rivals) were dismissed as latter-day Impressionists, equally superficial in their grasp of the fundamental principles of painting. To confuse the Orphists with the Synchromists, Wright and Russell declared, was like confusing a tiger with a zebra because they both had stripes. The only kind words in the essay were for the Synchromists themselves. Their art, the essay stated, represented a new form of picture-making “that would surpass contemporary painting in emotional power as the modern orchestra undoes the harpsichord’s old solo.”
Once again, the catalogues quickly sold out, an indication that the essay was indeed stirring up interest. But French critics without exception were offended and took the side of their home team, the Delaunays. One reviewer asserted that “the house painter at the corner can, when he wishes, claim that he belongs to this school.” Still another declared that “Macdonald-Wright copies with a dirty broom the Slave of Michelangelo.” (Macdonald-Wright did indeed often work with a very large brush, to create an intentional blurriness of stroke.) The critic André Salmon pretentiously announced that the Americans had created “a vulgar art, without nobility, unlikely to live, as it carries the principles of death itself.” Notably this show included Russell’s first abstract Synchromy, Synchromy in Violet, which he had dedicated to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, no doubt to encourage her to continue her financial support.
The controversy over Synchromism reached its peak the following winter when Morgan Russell exhibited his colorful Synchromy in Orange: To Form at the Salon des Inde pendents. Some twelve feet high, the painting was too big to ignore. Critic after critic denounced the canvas either for being completely incomprehensible or for plagiarizing the work of the Orphists. The pair achieved a kind of high point of negative publicity when the president of the French Republic, Raymond Poincaré, who visited the exhibition, personally took umbrage at the piece.
In fact, while art historians have often treated them slightingly, Russell and Macdonald-Wright achieved quite a number of notable firsts. They were the first American painters to create a new modern artistic movement of any sort; they were the only Americans to contribute to the development of modern art in Paris; and they were the first artists of any nationality in Paris to exhibit truly abstract paintings, in which clear references to a particular subject had disappeared. Moreover, although this has not yet been fully recognized, the work of the Synchromists was not a dead end but a beginning—for their originality was not simply on the surface but in the intelligence with which they addressed fundamental questions of art-making and visual expression. The alternation of hollow and bump, the rhythm of the human figure, the sense of human identity reaching out for some larger truth associated with the cosmos as a whole—these are all concerns that would find echoes in the work of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, though admittedly in a radically different visual form. Regrettably, many of their most exciting ideas were not well described in their manifestos and were missed by most contemporary critics.
And one more thing—something not to be overlooked, at least as regards their influence on Benton and Pollock—Russell and Macdonald-Wright were the first American artists to rewrite art history by composing a manifesto. They showed that being a great artist was not simply a matter of making pretty paintings but of seizing a place in history, and of staging a grand performance that confronted and challenged the assumptions of the audience.