International studio (56.1915)

Synchromism

edge of colour gamuts was not employed for
ornamental niceties, but was converted into a
method of creating an aesthetic 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 painting,
expressed by a single element of colour, is the
final technical aim of Synchromism.
At the first exhibitions of Synchromists’ paint-
ings at Der Neue Kunstsalon, Munich, and at
the Bernheim-Jeune galleries, Paris, the cog-
nitive object was still in evidence. The forms,
though distorted and disguised to meet the
demands of composition, were naturalistic. At
its debut Synchromism failed to take the step
from Cezanne to abstraction. Last year, however,
the material as well as the methodic defecation
had been reached by both representatives of this
new movement. Both had struck out into the
field of pure composition by means of abstract
form, though each followed a different organi-
sational scheme. In the old painters there is a
definite formal foundation on which the canvas
is rhythmically built, and, as a rule, the 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 develop-
ment of form. Russell, in his later canvases, sets
down a central form which dictates both the
continuity of the picture and its formal com-
plications. His generating centre is not like a
motif whose character imprints itself on all its
developments, but rather like a seed out of which
lhe different forms grow—a directing centre
which inspires and orders its environment. In
fine, the surrounding forms are not a develop-
ment 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 or fugue form of composition is achieved.
In Cezanne there are forms whose parallels are
repeated in varied developments 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
c

it. In Macdonald-Wright’s canvases the rhyth-
mic continua 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 struc-
tural forms 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.
With the apports of Synchromism there comes
into being an art divorced from all the entangle-
ments of photography, archaeology, allegory,
drama, piecemeal creation, inharmonic groping,
literature and data hunting. As Renoir com-
pleted the first cycle of modern art, so have the
Synchromists completed the cycle of which
Cezanne was the archaic father. They have
discovered the concrete means wherewith to
bring about his desires. It remains now for the
painters of to-day and to-morrow 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 ob-
noxious classification under a foreign banner,
simply means “with colour.” It explains no
mannerism and indicates no special trait. It is
as open a term as 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 abil-
ity to create. Russell and Macdonald-Wright
have already repudiated the appellation of
Synchromist, and call themselves simply
“painters,” for, since Cezanne, painting means,
not the art of tinting drawing or of correctly
imitating natural objects, but the art which ex-
presses itself only with the medium inherent in it
—colour. And the beauty of colour must grow
out of its significant expression^)!' form and
not out of its pleasing aspeO^Sls design and
decoration. Only when thMpIesson has been
mastered by the artists c^tbMay and to-morrow
will painting become^a^aesthetically potent as
music, for only then^Pit have become dynamic.