XIII Synchromism
In order to understand the last step in the evolution of present-day art methods, it is necessary to be thoroughly cognizant not only of what has taken place before but of the chronological development of all the qualities of modern painting, for Synchromism embraces every æsthetic aspiration from Delacroix and Turner to Cézanne and the Cubists. At the same time it reverts to the compositions of Rubens, complicating them further to satisfy the needs of the modern mind. Delacroix took the first decided step toward making colour an organic factor in art—a factor which would help present a more homogeneous emotion of the picture as a whole, and which would be intimately connected with the picture’s vital expression. He was a decided advance on those painters to whom colour was as arbitrary a means of adorning a good work as the gilt frame they placed about it. Colour with them was dictated by the demands of an age of voluptuousness and unrestrained living. The great art nations of Spain, Italy and Flanders were then passing through a sensuous epoch, and the painters reflected in their work the tone of the national temperament. The primitives of these countries and of Germany had used colour because the religious qualities in their pictures became more realistic when nature’s general tints were employed. By making their work more dramatic they were able to set forth more forcibly the lesson they strove to teach. The art of the primitives was primarily dogmatic. In it was none of those subtleties of composition which come only with the conscious artist’s delight in bringing order out of chaos: it contained only that simple and instinctive order which is the avoidance of chaos. That which the primitives had to say was so rudimentary and well-learned that it took a definite visional form in their minds. When dogmatism began to lose its charm for the painter his forms gradually became more suave, and his colour likewise grew gracious and ornamental. The lessons were forgotten, and composition as an element of first importance, dressed in a robe of rich and varied hue, supplanted them.
Such was the employment of colour at the advent of Delacroix whose probing mind sensed not only its importance as drama, but also its potentialities for brilliance. With him, however, it remained an adjunct to drawing—something to be applied when the rest of the picture had been laid in, an element with which to intensify the importance of subject. He gave a great and necessary impetus to its study, but he outlined no directions for its significant application: indeed, by following out his original concepts one is led into the impasse of Neo-Impressionism. But at so early a stage the impetus is the important thing, and to Delacroix belongs the credit for having set in motion the wheels of colour inquisition. It was Daumier, however, who, apparently ignoring it, brought its exclusive use appreciably nearer. By conceiving contour and form as one, he disposed, as it were, of these two elements which, in the scale of pictorial importance, had always been placed before colour. Had each successive painter profited by all the apports and qualities of his direct predecessor’s art, the progress of painting might have been more rapid, but it would never have been so perfect. Each painter would have inherited both the shortcomings and the merits of his forerunner. Thus one side of his art would have developed out of all proportion to the other. Daumier, going back to tone, discovered a wholly natural method for the achievement of intense form. His pictures present themselves as great bulks of flesh and matter, crude but vital, which have about them a force of actual weight. In nowise was he a colourist. He lived in a time when prettiness was the keynote of the day, and his whole life was a revolt against it. His reaction was so extreme that he disregarded the capabilities of colour.
The Impressionists, on the other hand, over-emphasised its objective uses. They held that the colour seen in nature is all-important for picture making, and proceeded to copy it. As a result their work is highly emotional, but only in the same way that a sunny landscape is emotional. These artists were the slaves of nature, doing its bidding; Gauguin bent everything into the mould of his own personality: and it is only when these two types of creative impulse combine and modify each other that great naturalistic art is possible. The Impressionists, being receptive, believed all that nature openly proclaimed. They unearthed none of its formal secrets; they probed none of its causes. Theirs was only the joy of the discoverer. But their insistence upon the discovery was important, because it helped give birth to Cézanne. He was a direct outgrowth of Impressionism, but he was also an outgrowth of art’s entire history. Superficially he may seem more closely akin to Pissarro’s school than to the older painters, since it was from Pissarro he learned his first colour lessons; but in reality he was more intimately related to a Giotto or a Rembrandt, because his knowledge of colour was used only to heighten the emotion of volume; and this volume, which Monet or Sisley would not have understood, was the chief concern of the old masters.
With the Impressionists colour was an end in itself. They looked upon it not merely as expressive of light, but as synonymous with light, whereas Cézanne, ignoring colour’s dramatic possibilities, used it to express and intensify the fundamentals of organisation, just as Giotto, disregarding the dramatic possibilities of line, employed line as a means to ordinate volume. Cézanne is related to Daumier and Rembrandt in that while these men created their art (which was primarily one of tone) by building up volume simultaneously with contour, he created his art (which was primarily one of colour) by presenting his visions as nature presents itself to our eyes and intelligences, that is, as forms in which tone, contour and colour are inseparable. That he has been little understood is due to the fact that his profoundly logical methods took birth in an age of “inspirational” painting. Matisse who came later made of Cézanne’s still-lives a highly enjoyable decoration whose destiny can rise no higher than that of tasteful and complete ornament. Cézanne’s art is dynamic, while Matisse’s is exaltedly excitatory. The former bears the same relation to the latter that a Beethoven symphonic movement bears to a ballet by Delibes. One inspires thought: the other incites to action, to spontaneous admiration and joy. Matisse loves and knows colour in its harmonic relations. He and Gauguin, by the broad beauty of their work, have given an impetus toward large planes of pure pigment. In brief the evolution of colour is as follows: it was used first for verity; secondly, for ornament; thirdly, for drama; fourthly, for its inherent beauty as light; and last, for intensifying natural form.
All this has to do only with the concrete side of art’s progress. There is also a progress of the mental attitude which is inseparable from art’s concrete development and without which its material evolution could not have gone forward significantly. This mental progress resulted in the emancipation of the artist from the intellectual limitations of his public. Up to Géricault and Delacroix painting had idealised contemporary life, had held itself to the interpretation of biblical history, or had spoken in legend and allegory. It had expressed itself in the Italian mode of drawing; it had followed set rules of balance and chiaroscuro; and above all it had possessed a very definite finish. Naturally the art historians expected this style of painting to continue indefinitely. But with Delacroix it began to change. The hard contours grew freer. The depiction of the human form halted at approximation. Drawing became more arbitrary. Then came Courbet who insisted that there was beauty in everything if one knew how to bring it forth. He turned to the commonplace life about him for inspiration, repudiated the suavities of David, the romance of Delacroix, the elegance of Velazquez and the colour of Veronese; and began to order realistic nature. About his name there grew up a tempest of adverse criticism; but no man so sure of his own genius as was Courbet could be weakened by public condemnation; and he made no compromise. Manet continued Courbet’s freedom of selection and painted n’importe quoi. The Impressionists also carried forward this modern attitude. They sought for that which generally was considered ugly, and made it artistically enjoyable by drenching it with light and colour. Then came Cézanne, Matisse, the Cubists and the Futurists, with each of whom subject-matter became more and more emancipated. Natural objects gradually lost their importance and grew more abstract. Form was considered for its own sake, and models were not copied merely because they filled certain utilitarian destinies in the spectator’s mind. Objects were used by Cézanne to create abstract ensembles. In Matisse the form itself became more purely æsthetic, though with him there was a residue of objectivity for the sake of illustrative consistency. With the Cubists natural form was an echo, a memory of life, retained because they were not sure of how to turn their minds away from it. Futurism attempted a rehabilitation of illustration, but lately it has been converted into a purer vision by the Cubists.
To sum up: colour reached its highest development in Cézanne; composition attained its highest intensity in Rubens; and the greatest freedom in material form was represented by the Cubists. Thus the art of painting stood in 1912. But at that time the development of modern means had not reached its highest point. The purification of painting had not been attained. The tendencies of the past century fell short of realisation. As yet there had been no abstract coalition of colour, form and composition. Colour had not been carried to its ultimate purity as a functioning element. Form had become almost unrecognisable but had just missed abstraction, its inevitable goal. And composition, the basis of all great art, had been temporarily abjured in the feverish search for new methods. The step from the condition of art in 1912 to its final purity, in which would be embodied all the qualities necessary to the greatest compositional painting, was not a long one, but until it was taken the cycle must remain incomplete. The last advance in modern methods was made by the Synchromists at Der Neue Kunstsalon of Munich in June, 1913. This movement was fathered by Morgan Russell and S. Macdonald-Wright, both of whom, though native Americans, were partially European in parentage and education. Russell is more than half French, and Macdonald-Wright, whose family name is Van Vranken, is directly descended from the Dutch.
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.
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.
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.
In the later works of Macdonald-Wright the motif form of composition is achieved. In Cézanne there are forms whose parallels are repeated in varied development throughout the work and are rhythmically ordered into blocks. But while these forms resemble motif repetition, they are not generated by rhythm but united by it. In Macdonald-Wright’s canvases the rhythmic continuation of a central form constitute the movement of the picture as well as the final character of it. In his Arm Organisation in Blue-Green one can discern near the centre a small and arbitrary interpretation of the constructional form of the human arm. The movement of these forms throws off other lines and forms which, through many variations and counter-statements, reconstruct the arm in a larger way. Again these lines of the larger arm, in conjunction with the lines of the smaller one, evoke a further set of forms which break into parts each of which is a continuation or a restatement of the original arm motif, varied and developed.
Macdonald-Wright holds that the forms which we have experienced in our contact with nature are more expressive and diverse than those which are born of the inventive intelligence. But, while it is true that every realisation of æsthetic movement or of the rhythm of form is based on the movement of the human body, it is not true that the human body is a necessary foundation for form alone. However, Macdonald-Wright, in interpreting the human form, makes use merely of the direction and counterpoise of volume; he does not indulge in the depiction of limbs and torso: the body is only his inspiration to abstraction. He changes and shifts its forms out of any superficial resemblance to nature. In his desire to cling to a solid and immutable foundation we recognise an artist who realises how meagre is the incentive to create abstract compositions. With centuries of tradition urging him to a realistic rendering of the life about him, he finds it difficult to break entirely with realism and to create without referring to materiality. Perhaps some day he will even forgo the inspiration found in the combined forms in nature. His work is tending toward that ultimate freedom, as also is Russell’s.
Such a development, however, cannot be definitely predicted, but one can say, without dogmatism, that in the future their work will become surer, their compositions of a higher and more complete order. With their knowledge of the fundamentals of rhythmic organisation, which is well in advance of that of the other painters of today, their progress seems assured. Their postulates are too definite to permit of the introduction of literary or musical transcendentalism; and their apports are too significant to permit of any retrogression toward metaphysics or drama. Their palette has become co-ordinated and rationalised. Their composition is founded on the human body in movement. And their colour, in its plastic sense, takes into consideration space, light and form. These factors represent their technical assets. With these painters comes into being an art divorced from all the entanglements of photography, of piecemeal creation, of inharmonic gropings, of literature and of data hunting.
But they must not be regarded merely as inventors of new pictorial methods, for their discoveries have already taken significant æsthetic form. As Renoir completed the first cycle of modern art which was ushered in by Turner and Delacroix, so have the Synchromists completed the cycle of which Cézanne is the archaic father. They have discovered the concrete means wherewith to bring about his desires. It remains now for the painters of today and of the future to realise more fully the dreams of a higher art history. With the Synchromists there is no system or method other than a purely personal one. The word Synchromism, adopted by them to avoid obnoxious classification under a foreign banner, means simply “with colour.” It does not explain a mannerism or indicate a special trait, as do Cubism, Futurism and Neo-Impressionism. It is as open as the term musician. As a school it can never exist. Indeed it is the first graphic art the application of whose principles cannot be learned by a course of instruction. Artists employing its means must depend entirely on their own ability to create. In Synchromist pictures the good or bad results cannot be obscured by the introduction of foreign elements, as in the case of pictures wherein nature is copied. Russell and Macdonald-Wright have already repudiated the appellation of Synchromist and call themselves merely “painters,” for, since Cézanne, painting means, not the art of tinting drawing or of correctly imitating natural objects, but the art which expresses itself only with the medium inherent in it—colour.
All significant painting to come must necessarily make use of Synchromist means, although form and composition—that is, the creative expression—may be as arbitrary or personal as the artist desires. In the Synchromists’ latest prospectus are to be found the following comments: “In our painting colour becomes the generating function. Painting being the art of colour, any quality of a picture not expressed by colour is not painting. An art whose ambition it is to be pure should express itself only with means inherent in that art. The relation of spacial emotions and of the emotions of density and transparency which we wish to express, dictates to us the colours most capable of transmitting these sensations to the spectator. In thus creating the subjective emotion of depth and rhythm we achieve the dreams of painters who talk of drawing the spectator into the centre of the picture; but instead of his being drawn there merely by intellectual processes he is enveloped in the picture by tactile sensation. We limit ourselves to the expression of plastic emotions. We can no longer conceive of the stupid juxtapositions of colours devoid of any rhythmic interlinking as art organisations.” The Synchromists do not pretend to have invented new qualities for art but to have brought to painting a new vision which permits them to express the old qualities with a greater potency than formerly.