Stanton MacDonald-Wright

Stanton Macdonald-Wright was born in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1890 and grew up in a well-off hotel-managing family. His father treated him to painting lessons when he was five years old. He traveled to Paris at sixteen to study art at the Sorbonne and the Beaux Arts, Colarossi and Julian Academies.

He and Morgan Russell developed the style they called Synchromism. The idea was that color generates form.

Returning to the United States, he lived in New York from 1914 to 1919, and then returned to Los Angeles where he turned from Synchromism to a more Oriental style. In the 1930s, he was a seven-states regional director of the WPA art program, and one of his commissions was a very large mural of the Santa Monica Public Library. From 1942 to 1952 he taught iconography at the University of California at Los Angeles and after retiring divided his time between Los Angeles and Kyoto, Japan.