Steve Martin on America’s two greatest artists
The eminent stand-up stalwart and comedy actor Steve Martin is a man of many talents and interests. Among them is a burning passion for fine art, especially that of the legendary American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. The two artists met in Paris in the early 20th century and are best known for establishing synchromism, a creative movement that Martin believes is wholly underappreciated in the art world.
In 2019, Martin teamed up with the BBC to promote the creative movement for a hopeful modern-day resurgence. The core philosophy, as MacDonald-Wright and Russell devised, claimed that colour was just as important to humanity as music and that avant-garde painting should therefore celebrate this notion.
“In Paris, they started working in this completely abstract way of painting,” Martin said on BBC Radio 3. “They called it synchromism, which means ‘with colour’. They were really interested in colour wheels. They could create depth with only colour. They saw that some came forward and some receded, depending on what they were next to.”
In collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) BBC Radio 3 aired a special broadcast in which Martin discussed his two favourite synchromism artworks. One, made by MacDonald-Wright in 1917, is simply titled “Synchromy,” while the other, smaller piece, “Color Form Synchromy (Eidos),” was created by Russell in 1922. “They are essentially minor things compared with most of the art that hangs at MoMA,” Martin lamented.
Russell and MacDonald-Wright studied together at the Sorbonne in Paris, and the work of local heroes Matisse and Cézanne heavily informed their bold, colourful style. While the pair were a pivotal impact on other US modern artists, such as Albert Krehbiel and Thomas Hart Benton, and the cubists Patrick Henry Bruce and Andrew Dasburg, their movement struggled to prevail as a leading force on a global level.
“I believe that paintings reveal themselves over time,” Martin opined. “It is great to be able to live with a painting, or visit a painting in a museum and go back and back. And the good ones really do keep on giving. It’s amazing. A picture is stationary; it’s immobile and yet it changes for you.”
Having looked at “Synchromy” for many years, Martin revealed that he is now convinced it was originally intended as a landscape painting. “I now see almost a narrative story. I always thought this picture was one thing and then sat here for an hour and looked at it and it changed.” He later described Russell’s painting as “voluminous and floating”.
Martin finally noted that, although he champions synchromism, it’s not important for people to understand its technical principles to understand the artworks. “I don’t generally care about theories,” he said. “The result of working from a theory could be fantastic, but you don’t really need to know the theory to look at it.”
Watch Steve Martin discuss the art of Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell below.
