Stanton Macdonald-Wright Notecard Folio

Stanton Macdonald-Wright (American, 1890–1973) carried the torch of modernism from Alfred Stieglitz’s Manhattan art space, Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, to California. At the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art, Macdonald-Wright organized a show in 1920 of abstract paintings that included works of his own as well as pieces by John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove. The first sig-nificant exhibition of modern art west of the Mississippi was coolly received, but in the decades that followed Macdonald-Wright gathered a following, and the WPA murals in Santa Monica’s City Hall are his work.

The approach to painting that Macdonald-Wright for-mulated in Europe and imported to the United States, synchromism, applied to painting the organizational principles underlying musical scales. Like the work of Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky, that of the syn-chromists eschewed line and relied instead on areas of uniform color. Georgia O’Keeffe was a fan, writing of a pair of Macdonald-Wright’s paintings in 1916,“Theory plus feeling—They are really great.”

Contains five each of the following notecards:
Conception Synchromy, 1914
Dragon Trail, 1930