During the early part of the 20th Century, in a period of great experimentation in European and American art, an idea was born that color should generate form. Through study of the color wheel and the understanding of hue modulations when they were placed next to each other, the Synchromist movement developed while coinciding with the avant-garde color movement in Paris called Orphism. Morgan Russell coined the term for the movement that he and Stanton Macdonald-Wright created, literally meaning “with color.” However, Russell embraced the color scales for only a short time, returning to representational painting after just a few years, whereas Macdonald-Wright spent a lifetime exploring this aesthetic.

Macdonald-Wright was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1890 and moved to California with his family at age ten. He studied at the Art Students League in Los Angeles from 1904 to 1905 and subsequently, in Paris, where he attended the Sorbonne from 1907-1909 and several traditional academies such as the École Des Beaux Arts from 1909-1912. From his earliest student days, the idea of harmony intrigued him. His belief that color, form, movement, and solidity could all be compositionally unified was increasingly confirmed and expanded by his exposure to Oriental thought, especially the idea of Tao which resided in the tension between opposites, in the yin and the yang.

In Paris, he met Russell and began discussing the idea that, “color and sound were equivalent phenomena and that one could ‘orchestrate’ the colors in a painting the way a composer arranged notes and chords in a musical composition. Their first exhibitions of the resulting “synchromies” took place in Munich and Paris in 1913. They also participated in the Armory Show in New York that same year.

Macdonald-Wright returned to the United States in 1916, after living in London, and settled in New York City; however, he was unhappy in New York because of the competitive art scene and his failing health, so encouraged by his doctor, he returned to California in 1918. He became extremely productive in California lecturing, organizing a synchromist theater group, publishing a book, and eventually becoming an administrator of the WPA Federal Art Project in 1934 until its close in 1941 for Los Angeles and later Southern California.

Throughout his life, he became increasingly involved with Zen and Eastern philosophies. By 1937, after his first visit to Japan to study Chinese calligraphy, his themes were inspired by Oriental legends and philosophies. However, he insisted that there was no such influence in his paintings, not believing it possible for the Western mind to apply Oriental ideas. “Our minds don't work the way theirs do. Anybody who has studied Japanese would realize the utter difference between our method of thinking and what the Japanese do.”

In 1952, after a decade of teaching Iconography and Oriental art at UCLA, he became a Fulbright professor in Japan and began traveling more often to Kyoto, Honolulu, and Florence. By 1953, he felt he finally achieved yūgen, an interior realism and sense of reality which cannot be seen, but which is evident by feeling. At this time, Macdonald-Wright felt free from the weight of his former ideas and was ready to paint his best work. His mature style of Synchromism came into full bloom in the 1960s when he dedicated himself again to a Synchromist style, after experimenting with other styles like synthetic Cubist in the 1940s.

In the late 1960s, he finalized development of a kinetic light machine that combines aspect of cinema with older color-organ technology, called a Synchrome Kineidoscope. He had started theorizing the device with Morgan Russell in Paris, as early as 1913, and the most advanced state of this color projection instrument that played optical compositions was finished in 1969. The artist and his work were further promoted by this development and also tied him in with other artists “dedicated to the realization of machine-driven works incorporating light, color, and movement,” from the Art and Technology movement of the decade.

When Synchromy, Kyoto was painted in 1964, the artist had spent January-February and October- December in Kyoto, Japan. There are Japanese inscriptions on the reverse side of the frame that appear to reference an enumeration, or reference to part of a complete set. The compositions of his earlier Synchromies were based on the human figure and often used the contrapposto pose of Michelangelo’s sculpture as a major design element. He experimented with pure abstraction only briefly (circa 1914), preferring to find inspiration in landscapes, still-lifes and, in works such as Synchromy in Blue-Green (1918; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art), the human figure. Although made later, Synchromy, Kyoto and Synchromy in Blue- Green both have triangular and circular shapes throughout the composition; however, the latter has softer feathered transitions between colors and has a darker palette overall.