The papers of Southern California painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright measure 17.2 linear feet and date from 1890 to 2008. The collection contains biographical material including address books and interview transcripts; correspondence with family, friends, and artists, including Morgan Russell, and his wife Suzanne Binon, Michel and Suzanne Seuphor, Ann and John Summerfield, and Bethany Wilson; contracts, correspondence, and other material related to exhibitions Macdonald-Wright participated in or that featured his works in the decades following his death; notes, drafts and manuscripts for books, and other writings; diaries and travel journals; invoices, inventories, legal and estate documents, and other personal business records; scrapbooks consisting of clippings and exhibition materials; clippings, exhibition announcements, exhibition catalogs, and other printed materials; sketches and other artwork; photographs, slides and transparencies of Macdonald-Wright, family portraits, travels, and artwork.
Scope and Contents:
The papers of Southern California painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright measure 17.2 linear feet and date from 1890 to 2008. The collection contains biographical material including address books and interview transcripts; correspondence with family, friends, and artists, including Morgan Russell, and his wife Suzanne Binon, Michel and Suzanne Seuphor, Ann and John Summerfield, and Bethany Wilson; contracts, correspondence, and other material related to exhibitions MacDonald-Wright participated in or that featured his works in the decades following his death; notes, drafts and manuscripts for books, and other writings; diaries and travel journals; invoices, inventories, legal and estate documents, and other personal business records; scrapbooks consisting of clippings and exhibition materials; clippings, exhibition announcements, exhibition catalogs, and other printed materials; sketches and other artwork; photographs, slides and transparencies of MacDonald-Wright, family portraits, travels, and artwork.
Biographical material consists of address books, interview transcripts, and obituary and funeral material.
Correspondence consists of letters with family, friends, and artists, including Morgan Russell, and his wife Suzanne Binon, Michel and Suzanne Seuphor, Ann and John Summerfield, and Bethany Wilson.
Exhibition files consists of contracts, correspondence, and some printed material related to exhibitions that Macdonald-Wright participated in or that has featured his works in the decades following his death. Some of the exhibitions include the Southern California Art Project, Kineidoscope film, and "Color and Myth: Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Syncronism."
Writings consist of drafts of essays, plays, and book manuscripts. There are drafts of A Treatise on Color with palettes and color wheels, The Basis of Culture, and Macdonald-Wright's autobiography Bittersweet: An Artist's Life. At the end of the series are a number of files containing photographs, printed material, and some notes that Macdonald-Wright used for various book projects.
Diaries consist of a number of diaries and travel journals. One diary was written in Paris in 1909 in which Macdonald-Wright muses over the aesthetics of art and his color theories. Five additional disbound diaries cover his life from 1939-1973. Travel diaries date from 1959-1972 and cover trips to Italy, Japan, and Hawaii.
Personal business records consists of inventory cards and lists, invoices, property records, and legal documents related to the Macdonald-Wright estate. Also included are files between the estate and various galleries, such as the Esther Robles Gallery and the Goldfield Galleries, in regards to donations of works of art during both his active career and by his estate in the years after his death.
Scrapbooks consist of a scrapbook related to exhibitions featuring MacDonald-Wright's works and scrapbooks of clipping.
Printed material includes a copy of Les Synchromistes exhibition catalog, a newspaper clipping, and The Future of Painting by Willard Wright. Artwork consists of blueprints for Macdonald-Wright's Synchrome Kineidoscope, a color and light projecting machine first envisioned by Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell as early as 1913 and finally completed in the late 1950s. Also included are newpaper and magazine clipping, exhibition announcements, and exhibition catalogs.
Artwork consists of a sketchbook, and a number of sketches and drawings.
Photographic material consists of photographs of Stanton Macdonald-Wright and portraits and photographs of his family. Among these photographs is a glass plate negative of his family coat-of-arms. Also included are photographs, slides and transparencies of travels to Japan and Hawaii, and of Macdonald-Wright's artwork. There are also five glass plate images of some of Macdonald-Wright's paintings.
Arrangement:
The collection is arranged as 10 series.
Missing Title
Series 1: Biographical Material, 1909-2008 (0.2 linear feet; Box 1)
Series 2: Correspondence, circa 1907-2005 (1.7 linear feet; Boxes 1-2)
Series 3: Exhibition Files, 1941-2005 (0.2 linear feet; boxes 2-3)
Series 4: Writings, 1913-2003 (4.7 linear feet; Boxes 3-7)
Series 5: Diaries, 1909-1991 (1.5 linear feet; Boxes 7-9)
Series 6: Personal Business Records, 1946-2006 (1.3 linear feet; Boxes 9-10)
Series 7: Scrapbooks, 1910-1994 ( 0.3 linear feet; Boxes 10, 19)
Series 8: Printed Material, 1912-2002 (1.8 linear feet; Boxes 10-12, 19)
Series 9: Artwork, circa 1897-1970 (0.2 linear feet; Boxes 12, 19)
Series 10: Photographic Material, 1890-2004 (5.3 linear feet; Boxes 12-18, OV 20)
Biographical / Historical:
Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) was the creator of a modernist style of painting based on pure spectral color known as chromatic abstraction or "Synchromism." He worked in New York and later primarily in Los Angeles.
Stanton Macdonald-Wright was born in 1890 in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1900 the family moved to Santa Monica, California where they ran a seaside hotel. A few years later he took courses at the Art Students League in Los Angeles, studying under Warren T. Huges. His older brother was Willard Huntington Wright, a respected art critic who wrote Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning (1915), upon which he collaborated with his younger brother Stanton, and The Future of Painting (1923), and later became a detective novelist under the name S. S. Van Dine.
At the age of seventeen, Stanton Macdonald-Wright married his first wife and moved to Paris where he immersed himself in European art and studied at the Sorbonne, the Académie Julian, the École des Beaux-Arts, and the Académie Colarossi. While in Europe he also befriended fellow American painter Morgan Russell and the two artists began working closely together. They studied with Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart between 1911 and 1913 and were deeply influenced by their teacher's color theory, which connected the qualities of color to those of music. Together Macdonald-Wright and Russell developed a style of painting based on color and named it "Synchromism." They introduced their work in 1913 at the Der Neue Kuntsalon in Munich and in Paris at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. These exhibitions helped to establish Synchromism as an major influence in modern art well into the 1920s.
Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell returned to the United States eager to promote their work and theory. It was not long before the two separated, but both continued to work in the Synchromist style. Together, they held one more Synchromist exhibition in New York in 1916 which received significant critical support. Macdonald-Wright also participated in the prestigious 1916 "Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters" in New York and exhibited his work at Alfred Stieglitz's famed 291 gallery in New York in 1917. Yet, financial success evaded him.
Macdonald-Wright moved to Santa Monica in 1918, where he taught and served as director of the Los Angeles Art Students League. In 1924 he published his instructive Treatise on Color. In 1927 he organized another joint exhibition with Morgan Russell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he also exhibited five years later. He exhibited at the Oakland Art Gallery, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, Alfred Stieglitz's An American Place gallery in New York, and the Stendahl Galleries in Los Angeles. From 1935 to 1942 Macdonald-Wright served as director of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project for Southern California, followed by a faculty position at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles where he taught for sixteen years.
In the late 1950s, Macdonald-Wright completed the Synchome Kineidoscope, a color and light projecting machine first envisioned by Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell as early as 1913.
Macdonald-Wright traveled extensively throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, spending time in Hawaii, Italy, and Japan. Macdonald-Wright married three times and died in California in 1973, at the age of 83.
This biographical note draws heavily on the Archives of American Art's West Coast Regional Collector Paul Karlstrom's collection description written upon acquisition of the papers.
Related Materials:
The Archives of American Art holds several collections related to the Stanton Macdonald-Wright papers. There is an oral interview of Stanton Macdonald-Wright conducted 1964 Apr. 13-Sept. 16, by Betty Hoag. There are also Stanton Macdonald-Wright Letters to Alan and Fanny Leslie, the Stanton Macdonald-Wright Collection of photographs, Stanton Macdonald-Wright Letters to Morgan Russell, Walter Houk Letters from Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and an Oral History of Stanton Macdonald-Wright by Jeanne M. Marshall for the Voice of America Conducted in 1967.
Separated Materials:
The Archives of American Art also holds material lent for microfilming (reels LA 1 and LA 5) including a brochure on the Santa Monica Library murals and six photographs of the panels while in Macdonald-Wright's studio. There is also a 1939 exhibition catalog for "Southern California Art Project" a master's thesis on Macdonald-Wright by Dori Jean Watson (1957), and one scrapbook of photographs, clippings, and other printed materials dating from circa 1910-1964. Lent materials were returned to the lender and are not described in the collection container inventory.
Provenance:
Stanton Macdonald-Wright first loaned materials to the Archives of American Art for microfilming in 1964. David Nellis, a gallery owner, gave the Archives the artist's unpublished autobiography in 1978. The bulk of the Stanton Macdonald-Wright papers were donated to the Archives of American Art by his widow, Jean Macdonald-Wright, in 2 installments in 1995 and then in 2019 as a bequest.
Restrictions:
This collection is open for research. Access to original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C. Research Center. Researchers interested in accessing born-digital records or audiovisual recordings in this collection must use access copies. Contact References Services for more information.
Rights:
The Archives of American Art makes its archival collections available for non-commercial, educational and personal use unless restricted by copyright and/or donor restrictions, including but not limited to access and publication restrictions. AAA makes no representations concerning such rights and restrictions and it is the user's responsibility to determine whether rights or restrictions exist and to obtain any necessary permission to access, use, reproduce and publish the collections. Please refer to the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for additional information.
Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Richard Diebenkorn, 1985 May 1-1987 December 15. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Topic:
Art -- Study and teaching -- California -- San Francisco Bay Area Search this
Painting, Abstract -- California -- San Francisco Bay Area Search this
Painting -- California -- San Francisco Bay Area Search this
Painters -- California -- San Francisco Bay Area -- Interviews Search this
An interview of John Hultberg conducted 1968 Nov. 11, by Paul Cummings, for the Archives of American Art. Hultberg speaks of his family background; his education at the California School of Fine Arts, and some of his teachers; the California art scene in the 1940s; his early paintings; abstract expressionism; landscape painting and other subject matter which interests him; filmmaking; the Club; minimal and pop art.
Biographical / Historical:
John Hultberg (1922-2005) was a painter from New York, N.Y.
Provenance:
This interview is part of the Archives' Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and others.
Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with John Hultberg, 1968 Nov. 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
An interview with Joan Semmel conducted 2023 January 6 and 18, by Gail Levin for the Archives of American Art, at Semmel's studio in New York, NY.
Biographical / Historical:
Joan Semmel (1932- ) is an abstract painter working in New York City and Easthampton, N. Y. Semmel's work explores erotic themes and the female body. She taught painting at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University from 1978-2000. Gail Levin (1948-) is an art historian, biographer, and educator based in New York City.
Related Materials:
The Archives of American Art also holds the Joan Semmel papers.
Provenance:
This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators.
Restrictions:
This interview is open for research. Contact Reference Services for more information.
Rights:
The Archives of American Art makes its Oral History Program interviews available for non-commercial, educational and personal use unless restricted by donor restrictions, including but not limited to access and publication restrictions. Quotation, reproduction and publication of the recording is governed by restrictions. If an interview has been transcribed, researchers must quote from the transcript. If an interview has not been transcribed, researchers must quote from the recording. Please refer to the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for additional information.
Occupation:
Painters -- New York (State) -- New York Search this
Biographical material; correspondence; a diary; writings; art work; subject files; photographs; printed material; and two scrapbooks.
Biographical accounts; a passport; a list of paintings in collections; a grant application; personal correspondence, including letters from Abraham Rattner from Paris describing the Parisian art scene; professional correspondence regarding the controversy ove Ney's mural for the New London, Ohio post office and letters from Hilla Rebay of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, N.Y.C.; a diary, 1918, chronicling Ney's army experience in France; a subject file containing preliminary drawings, clippings, and photographs of the New London mural; a sketchbook of mural studies; photographs of Ney's art works, portraits of Ney, and exhibition installations; clippings; exhibition catalogs and announcements; unpublished manuscripts; two typescripts by Hilla Rebay and James W. Riley; two scrapbooks containing photographs, printed material, and letters relating to Ney's studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; a drawing, "The Declaration of France," by Joseph Mielziner; miscellaneous printed material.
Biographical / Historical:
Lloyd Raymond Ney (1893-1964 or 5) was a Non-objective painter from New Hope, Pennsylvania and New York, N.Y. Known also as Bill Ney. Born in Friedenburg, Pennsylvania and studied at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Won a Cresson travelling scholarship in 1917 and upon completing his WWI tour in Europe, travelled to France with Abraham Rattner. Ney was commissioned to paint the post office in New London, Ohio by the Section of Fine Arts of the Department of Treasury which became a controversial issue. He was one of Hilla Rebay's favored non-objective painters.
Provenance:
Donated by Gretchen Ney Laugier, Ney's daughter. Microfilmed in 1989 as part of AAA's Philadelphia Arts Documentation Project.
Restrictions:
Use of original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C., Research Center. Contact Reference Services for more information.
Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Buffie Johnson, 1977 Nov. 22-1978 Jan. 23. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Topic:
Painting, Abstract -- New York (State) -- New York Search this
Mural painting and decoration -- New York (State) -- New York Search this
Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Ilya Bolotowsky, 1968 March 24-April 7. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
An interview of Thomas Chimes conducted 1990 June 14, by Cynthia Veloric, for the Archives of American Art Philadelphia Project. Chimes speaks about his Greek background, his childhood in Philadelphia and in several southern states, studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Art Students League, New York in the 1940's including a comparison of the two institutions and a discussion of the New York City art scene; teaching at Drexel Institute, Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts), and Moore College of Art in Philadelphia; the development of his painting and sculpture including the religious paintings of the 1960's, the metal boxes, and the transition to the portraits of the 1970's and 1980's based on his readings and interest in Alfred Jarry and Marcel Duchamp; and "Sleeping Woman" commissioned by the Fairmount Park Art Association.
Biographical / Historical:
Thomas Chimes (1921-2009) was a painter, sculptor, and educator from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
General:
Originally recorded on 3 sound cassettes. Reformatted in 2010 as 6 digital wav files. Duration is 4 hr., 27 min.
Provenance:
This interview is part of the Archives' Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and others.
Topic:
Painting, Abstract -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia Search this
Painting, Modern -- 20th century -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia Search this
Art -- Study and teaching -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia Search this
Art -- Study and teaching -- New York (State) -- New York Search this
Sculpture, Modern -- 20th century -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia Search this
Portrait painting -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia Search this
Painters -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia -- Interviews Search this
Sculptors -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia -- Interviews Search this
Genre/Form:
Sound recordings
Interviews
Sponsor:
Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service.
