Kannon

Artist Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890 - 1973)

Date1961

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions36 x 30 in. (91.4 x 76.2 cm)

ClassificationsPainting

Credit LineGift of the Hilbert Collection

Object number2019.364

DescriptionEarly in his life MacDonald-Wright was a co-founder of Synchromism, the first American avant-garde art movement to gain international notice. While studying in Paris at the Sorbonne, Academie Julien and other schools, the young MacDonald-Wright was deeply influenced by the works of Cezanne, Matisse and the other French Impressionists, as well as by the color theories of his teachers.

Synchromism attempted to connect the qualities of color to those of music, believing that both should be separated from representational attributes. Its adherents believed Synchromism to be the culmination of modernism, projecting art into the realm of the purely aesthetic. MacDonald-Wright’s style, however, returned to at least rudimentary representationalism shortly thereafter, and a viewer can detect recognizable subject matter in much of his work.

Along with Alfred Stieglitz, MacDonald-Wright organized the first exhibition of modern art in Los Angeles, “The Exhibition of American Modernists” at the L.A. County Museum of History, Science and Art in 1920. Later in his career, his imagination was captured by Japanese art and he re-adopted some Synchromist elements – resulting in paintings like this one, which depicts the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kannon.

MacDonald-Wright’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery, among other museums.

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