Synchromism
also: Synchromy
Synchromism ('with color') was the first specifically American avant-garde movement to be taken seriously in Paris. Founded in 1912 by Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, it proposed that color alone could build form the way notes build music: overlapping planes of pure hue arranged in 'scales' and 'chords', radiating around a central core. It arrived amid the Cubist and Futurist ferment and was quickly overshadowed, but its ambition - abstract form generated purely by color relationships - anticipated much later color abstraction. The movement is also the compendium's obscure-but-citable test case: it fails every popularity bar and passes the inclusion rule comfortably, with museum, encyclopedia, and scholarly documentation (including the 1913 Munich Synchromist exhibition) - proof the rule rewards citation, not fame.
Defining characteristics
- Form built entirely from overlapping planes of pure color
- Color arranged as musical scales, chords, and harmonies
- Radiating, concentric composition around a central axis
- Vibrant, prismatic color contrasts instead of line or modeling
- Deliberately abstract; subject matter dissolved into color mass
- Primacy of color as the sole constructive element
Key figures
- Morgan Russell (1886-1953) — Co-founder; sculptor's sense of color-as-form (Synchromy in Orange: To Form)
- Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) — Co-founder; theorist of color harmony and the movement's propagandist
Example works
- Synchromy in Orange: To Form — Morgan Russell (1913-1914)
- The Synchromy No. 3 (Synchromy) — Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1914)
- Air, Suite Synchromy — Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1914)
Sources
- Synchromism - Wikipedia encyclopedia
- Stanton Macdonald-Wright - Wikipedia encyclopedia
- Synchromism - The Art Story critical