Color crayons and pencil on paper, circa 1915-20. 300x220 mm; 11 3/4x8 5/8 inches. Initialed in pencil, lower right recto, and inscribed with a color notation in the key of blue-violet in Synchronism in pencil, upper left recto.
Provenance: Gifted by the artist to the artist Mabel Alvarez, Los Angeles; Glen Bassett; gifted from the above to the current owner, private collection, South Carolina, 1990s.
Russell (1886-1953) was a modern American artist who, along with Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973), was the founder of Synchromism, a provocative style of abstract painting that dates from around 1912 to the 1920s. Russell's "synchromies," which analogized color to music, were an early American contribution to the rise of Modernism. Synchromism was an early innovation in pure abstraction, which was developed primarily by Russell with contributions from Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Other American painters in Paris, where Russell had moved in 1911, who were experimenting with Synchromism at the time included Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Dasburg, and Patrick Henry Bruce, all of whom were friends with Russell and Macdonald-Wright. Bruce was also friendly with Sonia and Robert Delaunay, proponents of Orphism (a term coined in 1912 by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire), another contemporaneous art movement centered around color and abstraction.
