Learn About This Short-Lived But Influential Art Movement
The term “synchromism” means “with color” or “colors together”.
Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Their abstract “synchromies,” based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art.
You probably haven’t heard much about these artists because Synchromism was short-lived and did not attract many followers. Furthermore, Russell and Macdonald-Wright abandoned Synchromism about 1919, returning to representational works. However, Synchromism has been credited with being the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention.
Many artists were influenced by this movement including Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis and Andrew Dasburg.
Russell studied at the Art Students League of New York, NYC, with with Robert Henri, known for his moody portraits and rapid brushwork. Russell’s sources of creative influence included Post-Impressionism and he was inspired by Fauvism, led by Henri Matisse and André Derain, two artists who used bold colors.
The Powerful Influence of Music and Movement
Like many other contemporary abstract artists, such as Wassily Kandinsky, who wrote extensively about the association between art and music and he often titled his works after musical terms, the Synchromists envisioned pictorial abstraction in musical terms and arranged colors in a composition similar to sounds in a musical score.
These artists set them rhythmically or like a color scale ascending or descending. Often the colors would appear to be moving in a particular direction. They also believed like musical notes and compositions, color and form could engender emotions and sensations without being dependent upon direct representation.
Macdonald-Wright described how he purified his paintings to create effects through rhythmic colour forms, explaining that “color, in order to function significantly, must be used as an abstract medium.”
Above all, the Synchromists insisted not on the optical effects of color but the materiality and tactility of color; that is, they wanted to use color, and not the more traditional line, to create form and space. By layering and juxtaposing different colored planes, Synchromist paintings create space through a back and forth movement or a “push-pull” of chromatic forms.
The multi-colored shapes of Synchromist paintings also strongly resembled the whirling circles of the Orphist paintings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay and František Kupka. Sonia was an artist known for her experiments with color in art and design known as simultanéisme and orphism.
It is also easy to see the earliest Synchromist works were influenced by Fauvist paintings and Synchromist artists borrowed from the Impressionists who relied on color more than form to achieve their compositions.
However, the artists Russell and Macdonald-Wright denied being influenced by them and claimed that their work was purely original.
Additional notes: The Guggenheim Museum presented the exhibition “Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” November 8, 2024–March 9, 2025, which featured more than 90 artworks. It was organized by Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Director of Collections and Senior Curator, and Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, with the support of Bellara Huang, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions.
The artists included Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Mainie Jellett, František Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, and art by the Synchromists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell were also on view.
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