L.A.'s Master of Colors.(synchromism founder Stanton Macdonald-Wright)(Brief Article)

As the comedian Rodney Dangerfield might put it, Los Angeles don't get no respect... at least in terms of the history of modern art in America. The city has always been considered a distant second--maybe even third, after Chicago--to New York. Gotham hosted the groundbreaking Armory Show in 1913, enjoyed a whole Greenwich Villageful of avant-garde painters and poets in the 1920s and was the birthplace of abstract expressionism in the '40s. But do you know that L.A. was home to a painter (Knud Merrild) who dripped way before Jackson Pollock did? Or that Andy Warhol had his first gallery solo show in L.A., not New York? Or that the first American modern-art "ism" (synchromism) was the brainchild of an artist who--except for some neophyte years in Paris and a brief, disappointing layover in New York- -spent his whole long, rich career in the Big Orange? You'll realize that last one--joyfully, in spades--if you can catch "Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before it closes on Oct. 28.

With help from his fellow expatriate Morgan Russell, Macdonald-Wright originated synchromism (which held that color could be harmonically orchestrated, like notes in a symphony) in early 1913, when he was just 22. The two painters showed their revolutionary wares in Munich and Paris that year, but with no great career opportunities on the horizon Macdonald-Wright came back to the United States for good in 1915. Three years later he was home in Los Angeles, living with Mom. Within months the handsome and charmingly egotistical artist became a sought-after art lecturer and teacher. In 1920 he organized the first big modern-art show ever seen in L.A., and the following year he was one of the original teachers at the school (the Chouinard Art Institute) that would eventually become today's ultrahip California Institute of the Arts (a.k.a. CalArts).

Although Macdonald-Wright always stuck to his synchromist guns, he quickly let go of the idea that the theory required his paintings to look like cubism gone abstract. So he applied his esthetic to reclining nudes, California landscapes, self-portraits and otherwise conventional still lifes. In their day (the 1920s), Macdonald-Wright's ...