Appendix I: Memories of Macdonald-Wright

When I made a museum courier trip to Japan in the mid-1980s, I had a chance meeting with Professor John Rosenfield of Harvard, who reminisced at that time about his friendship with Stanton Macdonald-Wright. While working on this book, I contacted Rosenfield again, and in March 2007 he sent me this informative and vivid statement as an e-mail. Interestingly, his picture of Macdonald-Wright’s personality matches nicely with the testimony of Thomas Hart Benton (though, of course, Benton knew Macdonald-Wright years earlier).

To my mind, this little sketch is all the more eloquent because it was written spontaneously, without self-consciousness.

Esteemed Henry:

My eighty-two-year-old brain remembers you vividly, along with Macdonald-Wright, whom I knew well. Not that knowing him was difficult. Germane to your query was the fact that he was extremely personable, approachable, entertaining, and seemed to delight in helping young people. Macdonald-Wright had considerable insight (and sympathy) into Japanese culture. He had some Japanese language skills and was conversant with Chinese Taoism.

When I came to UCLA in 1957 to teach Oriental art, he sent me a note inviting my wife and me to lunch at his modest home in Malibu. He had taught the subject at UCLA in the past, and at lunch he gave me a precious copy of Osvald Sirén’s Chinese on the Art of Painting with his copious marginal notes. When we came to Kyoto in 1962, he invited us to lunch at his sumptuous quarters in the ancient Zen temple of Kenninji, and we went there many times. A big treat; he was a zealous gourmet.

He kept up his painting and was beginning to go back to the Syn-chromism of the sub-Cubist days. I had gotten to know an aspiring American expatriate named Clifton Karhu, who had given up his evangelical mission and was beginning to paint landscapes—muddy and inchoate. I happened to mention this to Macdonald-Wright. He said, “Take me to see this man.” Karhu’s studio was an abandoned tool shed. Mr. Wright looked at a few paintings, went over to K’s paint box, and threw the tubes of black and white out of the window. As he did so, he said, “Young man, you’ve got to learn about color.”

He and Karhu then became close friends. At the time Karhu was learning how to make woodblock prints, and with Macdonald-Wright’s guidance in matters of color and composition, Karhu became a very successful, semi-commercial designer of landscape prints that came close to tourist art. Later, however, they fell apart. I don’t know why.

Mr. Wright also seems to have been a part-time dealer in Japanese art. I know that he sold some big-ticket items to Avery Brundage. Each morning he would patrol the Kyoto dealer’s streets in the morning dressed like a grandee—with cape and cane and a wide-brimmed black hat. I couldn’t help seeing the resemblance to Frank Lloyd Wright and the GREAT MAN ways and image of the day. I had not realized the connection with Thomas Hart Benton (who had a GREAT MAN complex and ambitions of his own), but it makes perfect sense in the light of Mr. Wright’s character.

As a dealer with an unusual “eye,” he had a feeling for artistic quality, but I suspect that he learned much of what he knew from the jolly dealers on Shinmonzen and Nawate streets. His conversation never veered into art history, museums, collectors, or the art world.

My knowledge and memory are vague, but I think he was implicated in a major brouhaha when the Los Angeles County Museum wanted to purchase a large Chinese art collection belonging to General Munther, who had served with the police in Beijing before World War II. Macdonald-Wright vetted the material, as did Berthold Laufer of the Field Museum in Chicago, a skilled German archaeologist—but no connoisseur. The County Museum squirreled up a great deal of money and bought it, but before it was exhibited Alfred Salmony of New York University (who was no great shakes as a connoisseur, either) came through town and denounced the material. Many of the Buddhist stone sculptures were much later in date than claimed. Most of the paintings were not what they seemed. Other parts—ceramics, lacquers, textiles—were not so bad, but in no way merited the sales price.

There was a great stink. The bad experience caused a chill in the County Museum’s enthusiasm toward Chinese art that has lasted to this day. Laufer took his own life (I don’t know whether this or something else was the cause) and by my day the collection had been distributed to various area colleges. I never heard that Macdonald-Wright was blamed for the matter, but it may answer your question about his expertise. I think he was more interested in aesthetic theory and philosophy than in careful connoisseurship and art history.

I remember Macdonald-Wright’s wife only as a tall, attractive, well-groomed, colorless, rather conventional American lady, cheerful but clearly subordinate to the grand man. I recall that in her presence he told me that when he was offered tenure at UCLA, a dean explained that with tenure he could be dismissed only because of incompetence or moral turpitude. The dean said that he had no concerns about the first cause, and about the second he said, “For God’s sake, Mr. Wright, take them off campus.”

Thinking he would respond to a Parisian, I once took a distinguished French woman art scholar for lunch with the Wrights at Kenninji. She was a scrawny, withered old maid, and to my surprise and chagrin he was perfectly awful to her, rude and dismissive. Lack of pulchritude trumped Francophilia.

This is probably more than you wanted to know, but if I can help you further, please contact me at the home address below.

Hope this helps.

With all good wishes.

John Rosenfield

Professor Emeritus

Harvard University