MORGAN RUSSELL (1886-1953)

Morgan Russell was born to Antoinette and Charles Jean Russell in New York in 1886. Charles Russell passed away when his son was only nine years of age. Miner Antoinette remarried three years later. When she died in 1909, the young Russell found himself without any family; his stepfather showed no interest in him and ignored all correspondence from Russell. Rumor has it that his mother may have seduced him as a young boy. This may or may not be the reason why he took to cross-dressing and portrayed himself as a woman in some of his paintings.

Upon leaving home, Russell found employment as a model for James Fraser’s sculpture classes. He attended the Art Students League from 1903-1905, where he studied sculpture with Lee and James Fraser. It was in this same class where he encountered his future benefactor, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, an important patron of the arts. He enrolled in an architecture school in 1904 and studied there for two years. His studies in architecture influenced his artwork. Throughout his career Russell would visualize his compositions in three-dimensions, always using color properties to render depth.

With the encouragement and financial support of Whitney, Russel traveled to France and Italy in 1906. This trip had a great impact on the young artist. He marvelled at the many old Italian Masters such as Bronzino, Bernini and Giotto. Though it was Michelangelo’s work that captivated him the most. After his voyage to Europe, he returned to New York and studied painting at the Art Students League with Robert Henri.

The young artist left New York in 1909 and decided to return to Paris. There he discovered the Fauve’s brash use of primary and secondary color and Gauguin’s intriguing pigments. He encountered the famous American art collector and writer Gertrude Stein along with her brother Leo Stein. Through his association with the Steins, Russel introduced to a circle of prominent avant-garde artists, such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire. He attended Matisse’s Art school that same year where he learned new color principals.

In 1911 he met Stanton Macdonald-Wright in Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart’s classes in color theory. Their encounter had an enormous impact on Russell’s artistic career. Their collaboration and constructive critique of each other’s work was very productive. Russell and his colleague were primarily interested in the abstract use of colour. Together, they developed an abstract painting style they called Synchromism, meaning “simply color.” This movement was based on the idea that color can be orchestrated like music. The idea of musical analogy in painting was also central to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, who was developing his own synesthetic paintings, or compositions, in Europe around the same time.

Macdonald-Wright and Russell had their first exhibition of Synchromist paintings in June of 1913 at the Der Neue Kunstsalon in Munich, followed by the Gallery Berheim-Jeune. Russell also exhibited this work at The Armory Show in 1913, the first international exhibition of Modern Art in the United States. It displayed some 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 avant-garde European and American artists. This historic exhibition exhibited Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist works in the United States for the very first time. Russell and Wright’s paintings were the first American non-objective painters in art of the avant-garde movement. Russel also exhibited his work regularly in the major salons of Paris, including the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne, and the Salon des Tuileries.

By the end of 1915, he was ready to move on to something else, and his work became more realist than abstract. Meanwhile, Stanton Macdonald-Wright decided to stay true to Synchromism. Russell went back to the United States in 1916 to exhibit his work at the Anderson gallery in New York City.

On September 28th, 1918, he married Emilie Francesconi and the couple returned to France. After living briefly in Nice, Russel returned to Paris, where he found himself overwhelmed by the pace of the urban life style. On July 4th 1921, he bought a farm and settled in Aigremont, France, a village in Burgundy. However after being isolated for so long, Russell was forced to return to the urban chaos tend to his career. He exhibited in Salon des Independants in Paris each year from 1922 to 1925. Russell didn’t like the art business and believed art dealers had too much power over the success of the artists. In a continual limbo between artistic freedom and the necessities of his artistic career, he ended up making trips back and forth between the countryside and Paris. The lack of public appreciation for his figural compositions tortured the artist. Finding himself obligated to move on to Still Lifes, portraits and landscapes, Russell became increasingly depressed.

However, by fall of 1922, things were looking a lot brighter for Russell. He overcame his depression and went back to painting abstract Synchromies, calling them ‘‘Eidos,’’ or ‘‘form’’ in Greek. Russell wanted Eidos works to be accompanied by a kinetic light machine. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the means to build one. By the end of the 1920s his paintings returned to mainly figurations with strong Expressionists colors and Cubist technique and boldness. However, the artist never truly abandoned Synchromies. Later in life he combined figural painting and Synchromies.

In 1931 he went to California and worked with Stanton Macdonald-Wright at the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles. They were continuously exchanging aesthetic ideas. Russell was very much appreciated by the art community in California, and was welcomed by the Art Students League. Once he had completed the academic year in Los Angeles, he decided that he would return to France. For the next three years Russell would spent his winters in working in Rome and the rest of the time in Aigremont.

Through the last half of the 1930s Russell’s work demonstrated a desire to express religious meaning. His relationship with his mistress Suzanne Binon, a Catholic may had some influence on the focus of this work during this time. He painted several religious themes such as Christ’s Resurrection. After the death of Emile in 1938, Russel married Suzanne and upon the end of the Second World War, the two settled in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Russell converted to Catholicism in 1947. By this time Russell’s health had begun to fail. In 1948 Russell experienced a paralyzing stroke which forced him to learn to write and paint with his left hand. In the first few years of the 1950s Russell’s work was exhibited in New York at the Rose Fried Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art. Morgan Russell died in a nursing home in Broomall, Pennsylvania, in 1953.