SYNCHRONISM

Synchromism, often wrongly spelt as Synchronism, was an American art movement founded in the year 1912-13. Co-founded by Abstractionists Morgan Russell (1886-1953) and Stanton MacDonald-Wright, this purely abstract style was the first to bring America on the international stage of Fine Arts. It is easy to draw a parallel between Synchromism and its Contemporary Art form Orphism, which was essentially a trend or specialization in the Cubist Art that placed a premium on the understanding and the use of colors. Orphism was considered the crucial piece leading to the evolution of Abstract Art from Cubism. The body of works in Orphism was related to the Greek God Orpheus, who represented music, fine arts, and the musical instrument lyre. Synchromism never restricted itself to a particular subject or a group of subjects. Nevertheless, in techniques and forms it remained similar to Orphism

RUSSELL

Russell, who was born in New York City in 1886, visited Paris in 1906 and returned a few years later to settle there, supported by a stipend from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. A Virginian who was four years younger than Russell, MacDonald-Wright was in residence from 1907 on.
Though too late for the ''scandalous'' Fauve show of 1905, the painters were in time for its aftershocks - and for the rest of the prewar ferment in Paris. They met and became friends while studying with Ernest Percyval-Tudor, an American specializing in Ogden Rood's theory of color, one of many then circulating.
This exhaustive survey is in large part due to the archival material bestowed on the museum by Henry Reed, one of its trustees and a collector. Also a triumph of documentation is the accompanying monograph by Marilyn Kushner, curator of the show and of the museum's collections, and its introductory essay by William Agee, professor of art history at Hunter College.
Russell has already been revived by way of Synchromist anthologies, including a major one staged by Gail Levin at the Whitney Museum in 1978. But here he stands alone, a pioneer of abstraction and, depending on one's view, an important contributor to American Modernism.
A Russell ''Synchromy'' can be an abstraction involving diamond or wedge shapes that are generally but not always painted in prismatic colors; it can also be a figure or still life defined by stripes in the same hues. Such canvases occupied the artist from 1910 to 1916 and, after a hiatus, were followed by the ''Eidos Synchromies,'' where the colors tend to be more somber and there is a noticeable sense of space.