Synchromist

Besides a fine bathing beach, Santa Monica, Calif. also boasts an extraordinary Mayor named William H. Carter and a large imposing public library. Last week Mayor Carter went into the Santa Monica public library to re-open what in a fortnight has become the gaudiest main reading room on the Pacific Coast and to dedicate the largest mural finished under PWAP. Should a reader's attention wander, he would be instantly confronted by brilliantly colored likenesses of such assorted characters as Boccaccio, Gautama Buddha, Mayor Carter of Santa Monica, Adam & Eve, Cinemactress Gloria Stuart, Bach, Michael Faraday, Senator John P. Jones, Leo Carrillo, Michelangelo, Confucius, and Viola Player Samuel Lifschey. All this was the effort of Stanton Macdonald Wright, co-founder 22 years ago of the Synchromist movement in art, to wind Man's Imaginative and Inventive Development round four walls and over an information desk.

Artist Wright, pale, stoop-shouldered, with greying hair and a clipped black mustache, is a nephew of the late great Art Collector & Railroad Tycoon Henry Edwards Huntington. His father, Archibald Davenport Wright, was an amateur painter, architect, and builder of the Southern Railroad. His brother is Willard Huntington Wright, better known as "S. S. Van Dine," author of the Philo Vance detective stories. Artist Wright loathes Writer Wright's stories. Maintaining the family independence, Father Wright never looked at anything that his sons produced.

Macdonald Wright was born in Charlottesville, Va. in 1890, went first to Santa Monica when he was 11. At 15 he and his brother Willard were expelled from school. The next year found young Wright an art student in Paris where he made two lifelong friends. Thomas Benton and Morgan Russell. In 1913 he, with Artist Russell, invented a new art movement called "Synchromism" which was apparently another effort to create illusion through the use of color alone. Same year, wearing a long white robe, sandals, a flowing beard and a jade necklace, he held his first Synchromist exhibition in Munich. Artist Wright is still a Synchromist but does not talk about it much. At present he is more interested in a new process of color photography which he calls "Synchrome."

In 1914 Synchromist Wright returned to the U. S. Four years of New York nearly killed him. A nervous wreck, he went back to Santa Monica on crutches where he cured himself with the climate and a sober study of Buddhism. For many years director of the Santa Monica Community Theatre and the Los Angeles Art Students' League, he gradually gave up beard, long hair and artistic mannerisms, adopted a hard, exact manner of drawing that showed a strong Oriental influence.

Seven years ago Artist Wright went to the directors of the Santa Monica library, offered to paint murals in the reading room free as a memorial to his father. The offer was abruptly refused. Last year he made his offer again, provided that he be reimbursed for the cost of paints, canvas, white lead, etc. Regional PWA Director Merle W. Armitage headed a committee that raised $1,000, and last week the murals were up, 2,000 sq. ft. of them, in 38 panels.

Starting with a central panel of prehistoric men attempting to lasso a fire-breathing dragon, Artist Wright's history of the Imaginative and Inventive Development of Man splits right and left from the main reading desk. As he sees it, the ultimate in imaginative development is a symphony orchestra while the last word in invention is the photographing of a cinema with his "Synchrome'' color camera. In between he has been able to work in such scenes as Europa and the Bull, the building of the royal mosque at Ispahan, Beethoven at Piano, Galileo with Telescope, Faraday and Generator. All the portraits were carefully documented. For nonhistorical characters, Artist Wright used as models his friends and neighbors in Santa Monica. The model for most of the male nudes was Macdonald Wright's good friend Henry Clausen, professional wrestler, who went West to pose for the pictures. Unlike most matmen, Wrestler Clausen reads Goethe between bouts, boasts that he knows by ear every note of Beethoven. When Artist Wright was unable to pay him for posing. Henry Clausen put aside his Goethe, wrestled second-rate Negroes in the evenings for his board.

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