Russell first studied in New York under Robert Henri, one of the most sincere and intelligent products of American art. There he acquired a sound and capable foundation for his later work both in clay and paint. He then went to Paris, still feeling nature through the inspiration of Manet, and like Manet fell under the sway of Monet. From the Impressionists he was attracted to Matisse with whom he was personally acquainted. He did many canvases attractive in colour and competent as to form, as well as a number of synthetic and obviously disproportioned statues which recall the modern “Fauve” to a marked degree. Later he began to take an interest in Cézanne, and to his study of this master and of Michelangelo is attributable his later development in colour and composition. These men constituted his main influences; but in the course of his development he had cast a glance at Picasso and even at the Futurists; and it is a significant commentary on their methods that they are more susceptible of understanding than either Renoir or Matisse. Leo Stein, an astute and discerning connoisseur of the more modern art movements and a man who can see with occasional flashes of genius through the aspects of a canvas to its basic cause, no doubt had much to do with Russell’s rapid intellectual progress through the discipleship of the student to the creation of individual endeavours.
Macdonald-Wright, to the contrary, had little art training in the accepted sense of the word. Primarily interested in the purely technical side of painting, as were Renoir, Cézanne and Courbet, he had been influenced first by Hals, Rembrandt and Velazquez and later by their successors, Manet and the Barbizon school. Hoping to find help in the schools he studied at many academies, but after a brief period retired to the seclusion of his studio. About this time he began, with the aid of Chevreul, Helmholtz and Rood, to make experiments in colour in its relation to luminosity. Quite naturally the influence of Monet followed, and it was not until a year later that his enthusiasm for the Impressionists disappeared. He then began the construction of form by large and crude planes, building his figures with light and dark chromatic blocks. It was this broader application, coupled with his love of pure colour, that led him to an eager admiration for Gauguin. At this period of his development he met Russell, his senior by three years, to whom he has always admitted his debt for his early appreciation of Michelangelo as well as of the modern masters. From then on, through many struggles with light, he made rapid progress. When Futurism blinded the eyes of the younger men he went straight ahead in the path he had chosen.
Shortly after their meeting, Russell and Macdonald-Wright reached the end of their appreciative and formative period of imitation. They were both too intensely desirous of self-expression in its broadest and most precise sense to vary an already well-learned precept or theory. They were colourists, and had been even when passing through their most sombre stage. Now both turned to colour as to a longed-for goal. The art world at that time was being flooded with the mournful browns and whites of Cubism; and Matisse was too slight an inspiration to attract them, for they had consistently conceived form in three dimensions. Their desire was to create canvases of richly harmonious colour; but the difficulty lay in finding a new method of application. Neither of them was content merely to place suites of pure hues on the canvas, as an end in themselves. This would be to sacrifice organised volume for an ephemeral pleasure. Colour must have a formal and compositional significance, otherwise it would be but shallow decoration. The fact that, like all painters of the day, they were still bound to the depiction of natural objects, added difficulty to the solution of their problem. Their individual interpretation of Cézanne, however, little by little showed them the method by which they might eventually open the door on their desires. Russell approached form through light, combining both qualities in a simultaneous vision. Macdonald-Wright approached light through form, regarding them as an inseparable and inevitable unity. Both painters expressed their vision in the purest gamut of colour which painting up to that time had seen. Colour with them became the totality of art, the one element by which every quality of a canvas was to be expressed. Even their lines were obtained by the differentiation of colours in the same way that tempo delimits sound.
Russell began his Synchromism by extending and completing the methods of the Impressionists who had observed that one always has an illusion of violet in shadows when the sunlight is yellow, and who in their painting represented the full force of light as yellow, and its opposite extreme of shadow as violet. Russell, in observing that the strong force of light gives us a sensation of yellow and that shadow produces its complementary of violet, went further and discovered that quarter and half tones also possess colours by which they can be interpreted. He thus arrived at a complete colour interpretation of the degrees of light forces or tones. This method he aptly called the orchestration of tones from black to white. For it he made no hard and set rules. From the first it was a highly plastic and arbitrary manner of depicting objectivity. By modulating from light to dark (from yellow to violet) not only was light conceived forcibly, but form resulted naturally and inevitably. This was the principle by which Cézanne, although he did not completely grasp its import, achieved his eternal light which brought form into being. But the principle with him was subjugated to the influence of local colours, varying milieu, reflections, etc. Russell stated the principle frankly and applied it purely. Since his form at that period resulted from a sensitive depiction of light values expressed by colour, his canvases had much the same beauty of strongly lighted natural objects seen through the three-sided prism by which the transition from tone to colour is automatically brought about.
Macdonald-Wright approached his conception of Synchromism from the opposite direction. He had always been dissatisfied with the endless alternation of small shadows and lights which the Impressionists had introduced into painting, and with the tiny planes and spots which artists used for verisimilitude. He desired a method whereby the elements of shadow and light could be differentiated and drawn together in simple masses. He had studied pure colour more from the standpoint of form than from that of light, and during 1912 began to take note of the fluctuations of colours, their mobility when juxtaposed with other colours, their densities and transparencies. In fine, he recorded their inherent tendency to express degrees of material consistency. Thus with him a yellow, instead of meaning an intense light, represented an advancing plane, and a blue, while having all the sensation of shadow about it, receded to an infinity of subjective depth. The relative spacial extension of all the other colours was then determined, and a series of colour scales was drawn up which gave not only the sensation of light and dark but also the sensation of perspective. Thus it was possible to obtain any degree of depth by the use of colour alone, for all the intermediate steps from extreme projection to extreme recession were expressible by means of certain tones and pure hues.
The first Synchromist canvas was exposed by Russell in the Salon des Indépendants early in the spring of 1913. It was called Synchromie en Vert and recorded a large interior in which all the light forces were treated in their purely emotional phases. The canvas lacked the complete visualisation and the solid space-construction which characterise his later work, and furthermore it revealed many traces of the academic composition. However, had there been critics possessed of artistic prescience they straightway would have sensed in it a new force in painting. But the picture’s defects obscured their recognition of its potential vitality. This was due in part to the fact that the work lost much of its effect by piece-painting, that is, by the minute treatment of details each of which constituted an end in itself regardless of the total. Russell counted on the line of the different bodies holding it together; but he reckoned falsely, for if, in a work where colour is so important a part of line, the colour and line are not in complete harmony, the line alone is inadequate to effect the liaison of forms. In this same Salon Macdonald-Wright, not yet having arrived at a defined conception, exposed two canvases in which his later developments were but vaguely foreshadowed. Both pictures were formal compositions of nude figures painted in three or four flat planes of pure colour, and recalled Matisse and Cézanne more strongly than they presented a new vision. From the standpoint of efficient visualisation all three Synchromist works were failures, or at least they were indications of incomplete progress. In Russell’s canvas the diminutive breaking up of colour negatived what otherwise would have been the picture’s brilliant effect; and Macdonald-Wright’s large application of colour served only to place him under the banner of an established school. But both men realised that this was only a start, and set diligently to work on the canvases for their first exhibition which was booked in Munich for June of that year.
Between their first pictures and those of a few months later there was to be noted an advance both in conception and in application. Russell’s small colour planes, applied wholly from the standpoint of light, expanded and took on a new effectiveness. His form became more abstract, and his colour more harmonious. Also his compositions were more compact, though they were ordered rather than rhythmically organised. Macdonald-Wright’s progress was similar. In an interpretation of one of Michelangelo’s Slaves, used as the dominant form in an arrangement of three figures, all the academism which had marked his earlier expression had disappeared. His method had been liberated from the exactitudes of static principles, and had become consistent, not with the new colour knowledge, but within itself. The theory of defined colour gamuts, which from the first had been applied by these two men, had now become a scientific principle. Though the truth of it had always been vaguely sensed by them, it had not become a definitely comprehended formula until they had worked out the naturalistic laws governing colour. The Synchromist pictures in which these laws were boldly applied were first brought together at 13, Prannerstrasse, Munich, in June, 1913.
In November of the same year their work was again exposed, this time at the Bernheim-Jeune galleries in Paris. The show in Munich, widely advertised by coloured posters, had attracted considerable interest, but in Paris the exhibition created a two-weeks’ sensation. Though the more discriminating critics saw its importance, there was considerable adverse comment due largely to the Synchromists’ spectacular and over-enthusiastic methods of putting forward their views and discoveries. In their two specifically worded prospectuses they devoted much space to the shortcomings of Orphism, then in vogue; and although their criticisms of that school, coupled with the statement of their own tangible and logical aims, had much to do with Orphism’s demise, the impropriety of the attack created a feeling antagonistic to the new men. The appearance of their pictures was entirely different from any paintings hitherto exposed; and their conception, while being a normal and direct outgrowth of Cézanne, marked a revolution in formal construction. The inspiration of both these new artists was classic in that they recognised the absolute need of organisation which, if it was not melodiously and sequentially composed, should at least be rhythmic. Both were striving to create a pure art—one which would express itself with the means alone inherent in that art, as music expresses itself by means of circumscribed sound.
There was no precedent for purely abstract form—that is, form which has no antitype in nature—any more than there was a precedent for the construction of painting solely by means of colour and line. This was not due to an absence of desire in the artist for an abstract language of form, but to a natural diffidence on his part to break once and for all with centuries of tradition, and with one imperious gesture to cast aside the accepted raison d’être of the visual arts. We have seen how form from the first had been an imitation of natural objects, how it de-developed into synthesis, then into pure composition, how it reached a high degree of arbitrariness in Matisse, how it disintegrated in Cubism, and how in Futurism and Orphism there was a valiant attempt to convert it once more into pictorialism, to check its élan toward perfect freedom of creation. It is not therefore strange that the Synchromist exhibition should have comprised, with the exception of one canvas, figure pieces, studies of landscape and still-lives (some almost archaic in their direct and simple statement), and not canvases which abandoned all semblance to natural form. Russell and Macdonald-Wright were still occupied tentatively in expressing the forms they knew best, each by his own individual method. But despite this compromise with tradition their exhibition presented a highly novel impression. There were human figures distorted almost out of recognition for the compositional needs of the canvas and painted in bars of pure colour; still-lives which seemed to be afire with chromatic brilliance; fantastic fruits; life-sized male figures in pure yellow-orange; and mountains of intense reds and purples, warm greens and violets. All the pictures, however, displayed decided organisational ability, and they possessed a more complete harmony of colour and line than had been achieved by any of the other younger painters.
But that quality of Synchromism which struck the discerning spectator more than any other was the force of volume resulting from the relationship of colours. For years painters had realised that certain colours when applied to certain forms rebelled at the combination, that they refused to remain passively on the planes assigned them. But this phenomenon had never been given any penetrating study. The more sensitive painters had merely changed their colours to more tractable ones, and had thus avoided the inevitable conflict that followed the fallacious commingling of two highly affirmative elements. Such chromatic inconsistencies should have taught artists the necessity of harmony for the sake of perfect order; but the matter was left to personal instinct. The clash between colour and form, however, was not due to any error or idiosyncrasy of taste, but to the absolute character of each separate hue which demanded, for its formal affinity, a fixed and unalterable spacial extension. At an early date artists had recognised that blue and violet were cool and mournful colours, and that yellow and orange were warm and joyful ones. They applied this primitive discovery with the feeble results to be found in Neo-Impressionism. That these colours had any further character they never suspected. Their insight extended only to the emotional and associative characteristics of the colours; the physical side was overlooked. Had the painters been more scientifically minded they would have known that these characteristics, which were the feminine traits, could not have existed in isolation; and they would have searched for the colours’ dominating and directing properties which represented the masculine traits. Such a search would have led them to the meaning of colours in relation to volumes, that is, to colours’ formal vibrations which alone are capable of expressing plastic fullness.