International studio (56.1915)

Synchromism

new discoveries, rejected the fallacies and ration-
alised the valuable conclusions. In him was
brought to a close the naturalistic conception of
painting. He was the termination of the second
cycle. During this period, the older laws of
composition were for the most part forgotten. The
painters were so absorbed in the essential char-
acter of colour and light and the new freedom
of subject selection that they lost sight of all
that had preceded them. But by finding new
weapons with which future artists might achieve
the highest formal intensity, they opened up
illimitable vistas of aesthetic endeavour; they
made possible the third and last cycle which
resulted in the final purification of painting.
Of this cycle Cezanne was the primitive. Profit-
ing by the Impressionist teachings, he turned his
attention once more to the needs of composition.
He realised the limitations of the naturalistic
conception, and created light which, though it
was as logical as nature’s, was not restricted to
the realistic vision. Colour with him became
for the first time a functional element capable of
producing form. The absolute freedom of sub-
ject selection—a heritage from the second cycle—
permitted him extreme distortions, and with
these distortions was opened up the road to
abstraction. Matisse made form even more
arbitrary, and Picasso approached still nearer to
the final elimination of natural objectivity,
though both men ignored colour as a generator of
form. They carried forward the work of Cezanne
only on its material side. Then Synchromism,
combining the progress of both Cezanne and the
Cubists, took the final step in divorcing ’the
illustrative object, and, putting aside all local
hues, made colour an organic function. Thus
painting reached its highest degree of purity and
creative capability. The third cycle was closed.
This last movement was fathered by Morgan
Russell and S. Macdonald-Wright, natives of the
United States, though European by parentage and
education. Russell approached his Synchromism
by extending and completing the methods of the
Impressionists who had observed that one always
has the 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. In observ-
ing that the strong light force gives us a sensation
of yellow and that shadow produces its comple-
mentary of violet, Russell went further, and

discovered that quarter and half tones also pos-
sess colours by which they can be interpreted.
He thus arrived at a complete chromatic inter-
pretation of the degrees of light forces or tones.
This method he aptly called the orchestration of
black and white. For it he made no hard and set
rules. From the first it was a highly plastic and
arbitrary manner of expressing 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 Cezanne achieved his
eternal light which brought form into being; but
the principle with him was subjugated to the
influences of local colour, varying milieu, reflec-
tions, etc. Russell stated the principle frankly
and applied it purely.
Macdonald-Wright approached his conception
of Synchromism from the opposite direction. He
had studied pure colour more from the standpoint
of form than from that of light, and began to note
the fluctuations of colours, their densities and
transparencies. In short, he recorded their in-
herent tendencies to express degrees of material
consistency. Thus with him a yellow, instead of
meaning an intense light, represented an advanc-
ing plane; and a blue, while having all the sen-
sation of shadow about it, receded to an infinity
of subjective depth. The relative spacial ex-
tension of all the other colours was then deter-
mined, 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 certain
tones or pure hues.
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 ex-
presses itself by means of circumscribed sound.
Having rationalised the palette, they set about
making their form abstract, thereby eliminating
entirely the illustrative obstacle. Form in paint-
ing had first been a meticulous imitation of natural
objects. Eater it developed into synthesis, then
into pure composition. It reached a high degree

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