Synchromy

Russell completed the first major Synchromist canvases in Paris between 1913 and 1914, working in close exchange with his compatriot Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Together they launched Synchromism, coined from the Greek for "with color", at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in June 1913 and at Der Neue Kunstsalon in Munich shortly after, positioning it as a rigorously theorized American rival to Orphism and Simultanism. Russell had studied the color wheel writings of Ogden Rood and the sequential harmonics of Michel-Eugène Chevreul, and he believed that advancing and receding hues, arranged in the interval relationships of a musical scale, could produce in the viewer the same temporal unfolding that a symphony produces in a listener. Synchromy represents that ambition at its most concentrated: the warm-to-cool arc across the canvas is not decorative rhythm but a deliberately scored progression. The work entered the critical record as evidence that American painters could theorize abstraction as rigorously as their European counterparts, a claim that carried particular urgency in the years immediately before the Armory Show reshaped the American art market.