This vibratory quality Macdonald-Wright found and applied. By it he achieved light and shadow which resulted naturally by the juxtaposition of warm and cold colours. Russell, working altogether from the standpoint of light as revealed by form, attained practically the same results so long as his light came from the direction of the spectator, for in such a case the highest illumination was the most intense salient and, as with Macdonald-Wright, had therefore to be painted with a warm and highly opaque colour. But where the light came from a source at right angles to the line of vision, the expression reverted to an intensification of the Impressionistic method. Later this accident of light disappeared from Russell’s work, and consequently his treatment became less restricted. This setting aside of light as the motif was a necessary departure, for when Russell carried his work into the higher elements of pure form, a realistic source of illumination would have made his suites of abstract volumes appear, not poised and relatively solid, but as pateræ attached to an impenetrable substance. Under such conditions painting would merely be another and perhaps more beautiful way of making effective the ordonnances of surface form. But it would have no more power to create in us an æsthetic emotion than an exquisitely composed bas-relief.
The ambitions of the Synchromists went deeper. They desired to express, by means of colour, form which would be as complete and as simple as a Michelangelo drawing, and which would give subjectively the same emotion of form that the Renaissance master gives objectively. They wished to create images of such logical structure that the imagination would experience their unrecognisable reality in the same way our eyes experience the recognisable realities of life. They strove to bring about a new and hitherto unperceived reality which would be as definite and moving as the commonplace realities of every day, in short, to find an abstract statement for life itself by the use of forms which had no definable aspects. The Synchromists’ chief technical method of obtaining this abstract equivalent for materiality was to make use of the inherent and absolute movement of colours toward and away from the spectator, by placing colours on forms in exact accord with the propensities of those colours to approach or recede from the eye. The Futurists had spoken of drawing the spectator into the centre of the picture, there to struggle with the principals of the work. They failed in this ambition because their canvases lacked the intense tactility of volume. The Synchromists, by making the enjoyment of form purely subjective, and by expressing form both by objectivity of line and the subjectivity of colour, achieved the ambition of both the Futurists and Cézanne. The latter’s desire was ever toward a pure and subjective art. Although his colour viewed objectively is much like the Impressionists’, the pleasure of the Impressionistic vision disappears when the eye is satisfied, whereas our emotions begin to work on a Cézanne only after the visual enjoyment has run its course.
| SYNCHROMIE COSMIQUE | MORGAN RUSSELL |
Where Cézanne obtained a block solidity by the intelligent addition of local colour to light and by the subtraction of light from local colour, the Synchromists reject all local colour and paint only with hues which express the desired form. The position of a given volume in space dictates to them the colour with which it is to be painted. Consequently a receding volume whose position is behind the other volumes is never painted a pure yellow, for that colour advances toward the spectator’s eye; and a solid volume which projects further than the others is never painted violet, for violet expresses not solidity but a quality of space, something intangible and translucent. All colours and tones and admixtures are answerable to the law of natural placement. This law is not absolute; it does not anchor each colour at a specific and unchangeable distance from the eye, but it determines the relative position of colours in space according to the influence of environmental colours, thereby making their position both dependent and directing but none the less inevitable. The perfecting of this principle by the Synchromists introduced an added element of poise and a new emotion in painting—poise, because, by changing a line or a colour, the formal solid constructed by interdependent hues would shift and adopt another position answering to the needs of the new order:—a new emotion, because colour in all painting before Cézanne had been used for ornament or for the dramatic reinforcement of the drawing or subject, and in Cézanne colour had been employed to express subjectively the emotions of volumes found in nature.
In Synchromism, which was first inspired by natural forms, all considerations other than light forces (as with Russell) and form (as with Macdonald-Wright) and composition (as used by both) were abolished. Colour was made a functioning element out of which grew all the qualities of the pictures. At first, adverse criticisms were aimed at the Synchromists’ polychromatic nudes, still-lives and landscapes. The press remarked that the nudes appeared as if adorned in Harlequin suits; the landscapes, as if they were intended for theatre drops; and the still-lives, as if painted through a prism. The Synchromists answered that, in order to achieve a strong emotion of force and weight, they would “willingly sacrifice the lovely tints of the flesh and the joy of searching for coloured pots in the shops of the second-hand merchants.” But, despite all they could say, there was justice in the public’s criticism. So long as there was a natural form in a picture, the spectator would unconsciously judge it from a naturalistic standpoint. To be sure, there were canvases in the Munich exhibition which were almost unrecognisable as nature; but, before the aims of this new movement could be fully attained, a style of arbitrary and pure form was necessary. In the Bernheim-Jeune show Russell exposed one wholly abstract canvas. As an indication of a deflection toward pure composition, it was important, but the picture itself was as manifestly an artistic failure as had been his first large Synchromie en Vert hung in the Salon des Indépendants of that year. It was not the only failure exposed, however. From the point of view of complete and organised conception all the early Synchromist pictures were to a certain extent fragmentary and tentative. The large canvas by Macdonald-Wright, Synchromie en Bleu, was a flagrant example of a totally new vision unsuccessfully struggling with the objectively classic inspiration of a defunct antiquity. The group of three males in its foreground, while competently and intelligently built, had the appearance of allegorical figures struggling against a toppling world. Although their position and organisation were dictated by the needs of an almost El Greco-like composition, one was too conscious of natural objects to accept, with a clear æsthetic conscience, the seeming chaos of the elements.
In bringing together in a unified emotion all the impressions of form, the Synchromists at first overlooked the fact that purity of expression, in order to be highly potent, must embody a pure conception. Their early canvases demonstrated many new formal possibilities, but, while they were composed more compactly than those of the other moderns, the forms themselves were obviously naturalistic. Herein the Synchromists at their début failed to take the step from Cézanne to abstraction. Cézanne conceived all nature’s qualities—form, colour and tone—simultaneously. He was the first great realist, because nature dictated to him the colour he was to use. The Synchromists, on the other hand, used natural objects to create organisations of pure colour, thus making formal expression a wholly subjective performance. This method contained greater emotional potentialities than Cézanne’s, because where the latter’s palette was necessarily much subdued in order to approximate to the attenuated gamut found in nature, the Synchromists’ palette was keyed to its highest pitch of saturation. Cézanne’s choice of colour was never absolute in the harmonic sense, because he depended for accuracy entirely on taste and sensitivity. With Macdonald-Wright and Russell the palette was completely and scientifically rationalised so that one could strike a chord upon it as surely and as swiftly as on the keyboard of a piano: the element of hazard in harmony was eliminated. This knowledge of colour gamuts was not employed for ornamental niceties, but was converted into a method of creating an æsthetic finality other than that of form and line. If, in a complete balance of line and volume, the colour overweighs at any point into warm or cold, the poise of the whole is jeopardised and the finality obscured. The perfect poise of all the elements of a painting, expressed by the single element of colour, is the final technical aim of Synchromism.
In the first arbitrary formal composition by Russell the desire was to carry out the continuations of form from one chosen generating colour and at the same time to create linear development as well. His compositional theory was that, through the inevitable evolution of line from an arbitrarily chosen centre, the artist would naturally and consciously create form which would definitely approximate to the human body. In his Synchromie en Bleu Violacé the composition was very similar to that of the famous Michelangelo Slave whose left arm is raised above the head and whose right hand rests on the breast. The picture contained the same movement as the statue, and had a simpler ordonnance of linear directions; but, save in a general way, it bore no resemblance to the human form. The sketch for this canvas was a greater success than the final presentation, for its realisation was more complete, its order more contracted and intense. In both there was but one very simple rhythm with two movements; and the size of the large picture, which was twelve feet high, was incommensurate with the slightness of the expression.
His second large Synchromie, exposed in the Salon des Indépendants in March 1914, was more complicated and more sensitively organised, both as to movement and to colour, than his first. By his colour rhythms he strove to incorporate into his painting the quality of duration: that is, he sought to have his picture develop into time like music. The ambition was commendable although he wrongly asserted that older painting extends itself strictly into space. A Rubens, while presenting itself to the spectator at one glance, is nevertheless more than a block-manifestation of forms, for it never reveals itself fully until after many periods of study. In the old painters there is a definite formal foundation on which the canvas is rhythmically built, and as a rule this formal figure is repeated in miniature many times throughout the canvas. These form-echoes are defined and complete linear orders, and into them rhythm is introduced. In Russell the process is reversed: with him the rhythm brings about the order. In Rubens there is a distinct and conscious development of line, but no development of form. Russell, in his later canvases, sets down a central form which dictates both the continuity of the picture and its formal complications. His generating centre is not like a motif whose character imprints itself on all its developments, but rather like a seed out of which the different forms grow—a directing centre which inspires and orders its environment. In fine, the surrounding forms are not a development of the central one, but a result of it. This type of composition corresponds to the melodic composition in music.