With help from his fellow expatriate Morgan Russell, Macdonald-Wright originated synchromism (which held that color could be harmonically orchestrated, like notes in a symphony) in early 1913, when he was just 22. The two painters showed their revolutionary wares in Munich and Paris that year, but with no great career opportunities on the horizon Macdonald-Wright came back to the United States for good in 1915. Three years later he was home in Los Angeles, living with Mom. Within months the handsome and charmingly egotistical artist became a sought-after art lecturer and teacher. In 1920 he organized the first big modern-art show ever seen in L.A., and the following year he was one of the original teachers at the school (the Chouinard Art Institute) that would eventually become today’s ultrahip California Institute of the Arts (a.k.a. CalArts).
Although Macdonald-Wright always stuck to his synchromist guns, he quickly let go of the idea that the theory required his paintings to look like cubism gone abstract. So he applied his esthetic to reclining nudes, California landscapes, self-portraits and otherwise conventional still lifes. In their day (the 1920s), Macdonald-Wright’s pictures probably looked garishly daring. Later on, their full-spectrum prettiness and optimism appeared a little corny–which is part of the reason that Macdonald-Wright shows up prominently in so few standard art histories and textbooks. But in “Color, Myth, and Music” his work really sings again, with an intelligent brightness that’s positively uplifting. Not only that, but when Macdonald-Wright ventures into social realism (he directed L.A.’s WPA art program) and Zen Buddhism in the ’30s, and then returns to abstraction in the 1950s, his paintings miraculously re-exude much of their original zip.
This deliciously concise exhibition of about 70 works–improbably organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art–takes a few chances of its own in terms of installation design. The walls at LACMA are painted muted green, lavender and pink, and there’s even a wall patterned with triangles, rectangles and squares reprised from the artist’s own design. Macdonald-Wright was hardly an impoverished prophet without honor in his home city. He taught for a long time at UCLA, and was made professor emeritus in 1955 after he retired. And CalArts grew up to become–along with UCLA and Art Center College of Design–one of the hottest U.S. producers of new 21st-century artists whose works are collected by show-business moguls as soon as they’re out of school. That phenomenon has in turn fueled a contemporary gallery scene that is likely even better than New York’s in terms of sales-to-inventory ratio.
And when L.A. gallery goers desire a little museum gravity these days, they have an ample menu to choose from. In fact, through Aug. 26 the sumptuous Getty Center has the perfect complement to synchromism in “Illuminating Color,” a show of medieval manuscript illuminations. So does the Norton Simon Museum in nearby Pasadena: “The Chromatic Eye: New York Paintings From the 1960s,” on view until Oct. 22. And if you want a summing up of where all this has led, try “Snapshot: New Art From Los Angeles,” at (appropriately) the UCLA Hammer Museum, through Sept. 2. Of all Macdonald-Wright’s varied accomplishments, the one he might have enjoyed most is helping to prove Rodney Dangerfield wrong.
