International studio (56.1915)

Synchromism

of arbitrariness in Matisse, and disintegrated in
Cubism. The Synchromists took the final step
toward abstraction. Their desire was to express,
by means of colour, form which would be as
simple as a Michelangelo drawing, and which
would give subjectively the same emotion that
the Renaissance master gives objectively. They
wished to create images of such logical structure
that the imagination would experience their un-
recognisable reality in the same way that our
eyes experience the recognisable realities of life;
that is, they wished to find an abstract statement
of life itself by the use of forms which have no
definable aspects. Their chief technical method
of obtaining this abstract equivalent for material-
ity 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.
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 to them. But
the phenomenon was never given any penetrat-
ing study. The more sensitive painters merely
changed their colours to more tractable ones,
and thus avoided the inevitable conflict which
followed the fallacious commingling of two highly
affirmative elements. This clash between colour
and form was not due to any error or idio-
syncrasy of taste, but to the absolute character
of each separate hue which demanded, for its
formal affinity, a fixed and unalterable spacial
extension. Had the older painters been more
scientifically minded, they would have known
that the associative and emotional character-
istics of colour could not have existed in isolation,
and they would have searched for its dominating
and directing properties. Such a search would
have led them to the meaning of colours in re-
lation to volume; that is, to colours’ formal
vibrations which alone are capable of expressing
plastic fullness. This vibratory quality is ac-
curately applied in the Synchromists’ paintings,
with the result that their canvases exhibit a
powerful voluminous force.
Where Cezanne 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 that
volume is to be represented. Consequently, a
receding volume whose position is behind 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
are answerable to the law of natural placement.
The 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 direct-
ing but none the less inevitable. The perfecting
of this principle by the Synchromists introduced
an added element of poise and a new emotion
into painting—poise, because by changing a line
or a colour, the formal solid constructed by inter-
dependent colours would shift and adopt another
position answering to the needs of the new order;
—a new emotion, because colour in all painting
before Cezanne had been used for ornament or
for the dramatic reinforcement of drawing or
subject; and in Cezanne colour had been employed
to express subjectively the emotions of volumes
found in nature.
Cezanne 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 Synchrom-
ists, on the other hand, used natural objects
(before they had arrived at complete abstraction)
to create organisations of pure colour, thus making
formal expression a wholly subjective per-
formance. This new method contained greater
emotional potentialities than Cezanne’s, for
whereas the latter’s palette was necessarily
subdued in order to approximate to the at-
tenuated gamut found in nature, the Synchrom-
ist’s palette was keyed to the highest pitch of
saturation. Cezanne’s choice of colour was never
absolute in the harmonic sense, because he
depended entirely on taste and sensitivity.
With the Synchromists the palette was completely
and scientifically co-ordinated so that one could
strike a chord upon it as surely and as swiftly
as on the keyboard of the piano; the element of
hazard in harmony was eliminated. This knowl-