Synchromism was an art movement

Art movement

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...

 founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell

Morgan Russell

Morgan Russell was a U.S. abstract painter. He was born and raised in New York City in 1886. He was, along with artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the founder of Synchromism an important modernist movement in early 20th century art.-Biography:Initially he studied architecture and after 1903 he...

. Their abstract "synchromies", based on a theory of color that analogized it to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art. Synchromism became the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention.

Theory and style

Synchromism is based on the idea that color

Color

Color or colour is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, green, blue and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors...

 and sound

Sound

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...

 are similar phenomena, and that the colors in a painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

 arranges note

Note

In music, the term note has two primary meanings:#A sign used in musical notation to represent the relative duration and pitch of a sound;#A pitched sound itself....

s in a symphony

Symphony

A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, scored almost always for orchestra. A symphony usually contains at least one movement or episode composed according to the sonata principle...

. Macdonald-Wright and Russell believed that by painting in color scales

Musical scale

In music, a scale is a sequence of musical notes in ascending and descending order. Most commonly, especially in the context of the common practice period, the notes of a scale will belong to a single key, thus providing material for or being used to conveniently represent part or all of a musical...

, their work could evoke music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

al sensations. It became abstract and expressive, hoping to unite visual and auditory stimuli through a symphony of color. This phenomenon of 'hearing' a color or the pairing of two or more senses--synesthesia

Synesthesia

Synesthesia , from the ancient Greek , "together," and , "sensation," is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway...

--was also central to the work of Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...

, who was developing his own synesthetic paintings, or 'compositions', in Europe around the same time.

The abstract

Abstract art

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...

 "synchromies" are based on color scales, using rhythmic color forms with advancing and reducing hues. They typically have a central vortex

Vortex

A vortex is a spinning, often turbulent,flow of fluid. Any spiral motion with closed streamlines is vortex flow. The motion of the fluid swirling rapidly around a center is called a vortex...

 and explode in complex color harmonies. The Synchromists avoided using atmospheric perspective or line, relying solely on color and shape to express form.

The earliest synchromist works were similar to Fauvist

Fauvism

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...

 paintings. The multicolored shapes of synchromist paintings also resembled those found in orphism

Orphism (art)

Orphism or Orphic Cubism , the term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, was a little known art movement during the time of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colors influenced by Fauvism and the dye chemist Eugène Chevreul...

. MacDonald-Wright insisted, however, that Synchromism was a unique art form, and "has nothing to do with orphism and anybody who has read the first catalogue of synchromism ... would realize that we poked fun at orphism".

History

Synchromism was developed by Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell while they were studying in Paris during the early 1910s. From 1911 to 1913, they studied under the Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart, whose color theory connected qualities of color to qualities of music, such as tone

Tone

- Tone :* Tone , a literary technique which encompasses the attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work* Tone , the pitch and pitch changes in words of certain languages...

 to hue

Hue

Hue is one of the main properties of a color, defined technically , as "the degree to which a stimulus can be describedas similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, green, blue, and yellow,"...

 and intensity to saturation

Saturation

Saturation or saturated may refer to:- Meteorology :* Dew point, which is a temperature that occurs when atmospheric humidity reaches 100% and the air is saturated with moisture- Physics :...

. Also influential upon MacDonald-Wright and Russell were the paintings of the Impressionists, Cezanne, and Matisse, which heavily emphasized color. Russell coined the term "synchromism" in 1912, in an express attempt to convey the linkage of painting and music.

The first synchromist painting, Russell's Synchromy in Green, exhibited at the Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 Salon des Indépendants in 1913. Later that year, the first synchromist exhibition by Macdonald-Wright and Russell was shown in Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

. Exhibits followed in Paris in October 1913, and in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 in March 1914. Macdonald-Wright moved back to the U.S. in 1914, but he and Russell continued to separately paint abstract synchromies. Synchromism remained influential well into the 1920s. Other American painters who experimented with Synchromism include Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton (painter)

Thomas Hart Benton was an American painter and muralist. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His fluid, almost sculpted paintings showed everyday scenes of life in the United States...

, Andrew Dasburg

Andrew Dasburg

Andrew Michael Dasburg was an American modernist painter and "one of America's leading early exponents of cubism".-Biography:...

, Patrick Henry Bruce

Patrick Henry Bruce

Patrick Henry Bruce was an American cubist painter.-Biography:A descendant of Patrick Henry, Bruce was born in Campbell County, Virginia, the second of four children. His family had once owned a huge plantation, Berry Hill, worked by over 3,000 slaves...

, and Albert Henry Krehbiel

Albert Henry Krehbiel

Albert Henry Krehbiel , was an American artist who was born in Denmark, Iowa and who taught, lived and worked for many years in Chicago. Although educated as a realist in Paris, which is reflected in his neoclassical mural works, soon developed a strong appreciation for impressionism and is mainly...

.