Morgan Russell (1886 -1953)

Morgan Russell was born in New York, where he studied sculpture at the art Students League and painting under Robert Henri. In 1908 he settled in Paris, where he briefly attended Henri Matisse school of painting and drawing. By 1910 he was devoting himself increasingly to painting, and in 1911 he met Macdonald-Wright, with whom he developed theories about the analogies between colours and musical patterns. In 1911 they launched 'synchromism' which means literally 'colours together'. Russell and Macdonald-Wright were concerned with the purely abstract use of colour; in 1912 Russell said that he wished to do 'a piece of expression solely by means of colour and the way it is put down, in showers and broad patches, distinctly separated from each other, or blended ... but with force and clearness and large geometric patterns'. Synchromism was very close to Orphism and the two Americans protested in manifestos that they had primacy. Russell's Synchromy in Orange: To Form (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1913-14) won him considerable renown when shown in Paris.

Although the movement petered out with the First World War, Synchromism influenced several American artists, and its founders hold distinguished places in the vanguard of abstract art .His later work, in which he reintroduced figurative elements, was much less memorable than were his pioneering abstract paintings. He lived in Paris until 1946, then returned to the USA