ART ESSENTIALS: Modern Art - Read an Extract

This is an extract from Modern Art.

SYNCHROMISM

1913–c.1918

Synchromism (meaning ‘with colour’, derived from Greek) was a style of painting invented by two American painters, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. They drew on the structural principles of Cubism and the colour theories of the Neo-Impressionists in their experiments in colour abstraction. Like their contemporaries, they strove to formulate a system in which meaning did not rely on resemblance to objects in the outside world, but was derived from the results of colour and form on canvas.

Russell was also a musician and his aim was to orchestrate colour and form into harmonious compositions like those in musical symphonies. The musical analogy, and other Synchromist features, are visible in Russell’s monumental painting Synchromy in Orange: To Form (1913–14). Cubist structures are enlivened by chromatic combinations and free-flowing rhythms and arcs, which create a sense of dynamism.

The Synchromists exhibited in Munich, Paris and New York in 1913 and 1914, causing uproar and controversy. They exerted an enormous influence on other American artists, however, such as Thomas Hart Benton, Patrick Henry Bruce and Arthur B. Davies, who were all called Synchromists at some point in their careers. By the end of the First World War Synchromism had almost entirely died out, with many of its practitioners returning to figuration.

KEY ARTISTS

Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973), USA

Morgan Russell (1886–1953), USA

KEY FEATURES

Vivid colours and geometric shapes

Free-flowing rhythms and arcs

Abstract, non-representational

A sense of movement and dynamism

MEDIA

Painting

KEY COLLECTIONS

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA

Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ, USA

Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, New York, NY, USA

Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA

ORPHISM

1913–c.1918

Orphism – or Orphic Cubism – was a term coined by French critic-poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1913 to describe what he saw as a ‘movement’ within Cubism. Unlike monochromatic Cubist works, these new abstract paintings were bright lozenges and swirls of saturated colour dissolving into each other. Orphism referred to the myth of Orpheus, the legendary Greek poet and lyre-player, whose music could tame wild beasts. For Apollinaire this term conveyed the musical, spiritual quality of these harmonious compositions that furthered the fragmentation of Cubism through colour.

The two painters most enduringly associated with Orphism are French painter Robert Delaunay and his Russian wife, Sonia. Both were pioneers of colour abstraction. Robert studied Neo- Impressionism, optics and the interrelationships of colour, light and movement, and produced works such as Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (1913), in which the principal means of expression lies in the composition of colour rhythms. Apollinaire called Delaunay’s pictures ‘coloured Cubism’, but Delaunay coined his own term, ‘Simultanism’, to describe his style. Between 1912 and 1914 Sonia made her first abstract paintings in the Orphist style. Typically working in many different media, she also made collages, book bindings and illustrations, and clothing, taking the new abstract style into the applied arts.

KEY ARTISTS

Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), France

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), Russia-France

František Kupka (1871–1957), Czechoslovakia

KEY FEATURES

Abstract compositions

Bright colours

Swirling shapes

MEDIA

Painting and applied arts

KEY COLLECTIONS

National Gallery in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris, France

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA

The first title in the Art Essentials series is Looking at Pictures. Read an extract here.