West Coast Pioneer

Stanton Macdonald-Wright, a hale and hearty 65, is not only the dean of California painters, but one of the few U.S. painters likely to get at least footnote mention in the history of modern European painting. He is also a man given to confounding the experts. The art critics pronounced him through at 30; his doctors, unable to diagnose a mysterious illness, gave up his case as hopeless at 47. Both critics and doctors were wrong. A major retrospective show of 83 of his oils, at Los Angeles County Museum last week, clearly showed that Macdonald-Wright is very much alive; in the opinion of critics and gallerygoers, his latest paintings are among his very best.

Macdonald-Wright, brother of Mystery Writer S. S. Van Dine (real name: Willard Huntington Wright), grew up in a well-off hotel-managing family. His father treated him to painting lessons at five. At 15 young Stan rebelliously went to sea on a windjammer, got so seasick that he was put off at Hawaii. Private detectives sent by his father brought him back home. His family solved his wanderlust by sending him off at 16 to France to study art.

In Paris Stanton Macdonald-Wright soon floated into the heady atmosphere of the postimpressionists. Teaming up with a fellow American, Morgan Russell, he worked out basic principles of an abstract style, based on scientific color theories, which he called "Synchromy." The results' first shown in 1913, were curving, intersecting volumes of light, which today take their place on the artistic map, alongside the "Orphism" of French Painter Robert Delaunay and Italian futurist studies of forms in motion, as feeder streams into the main current of 20th century art.

Of his current work, Macdonald-Wright says: "At first I saw my new painting with a certain astonishment--for I had made the 'great circle,' coming back after 35 years to an art that was, superficially, not unlike the canvases of my youth." From the '205 through the '405, Macdonald-Wright had deserted his theory for experimental work ranging from sensuous figure studies to Braque-like still lifes. But after a trip to Japan four years ago, he began working again in the style of his earlier abstractions. Studying Japanese art and Oriental philosophy, he found a strength and "interior realism" that he felt was the missing element in his Paris paintings. The result, as shown last week, is a richer, more serene art, with formal,' soaring movements and pure color that suggest visualized orchestral music.

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