 |
||
| In 1908, after he had studied painting in New York, Russell departed for Paris, France, where he was to live until 1946. He met Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, and fellow American expatriates Leo and Gertrude Stein, whose house was a meeting place for the most avant-garde European and American artists working in Paris in the years just before World War I. Continuing his training, Russell studied painting with Henri Matisse and made drawings of the sculpture he saw in the Louvre, especially Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, which was to become a primary influence on his early work.
It was also in Paris that Russell befriended Stanton MacDonald-Wright, with whom he was to make America’s only contribution to modernism before World War I. Together, Russell and MacDonald-Wright developed their own style, called Synchromism, dedicated to the realization of form through the juxtaposition of warm and cool colors as opposed to modeling by the conventional means of light and dark. Russell outlined his theory in an introduction to a now-famous exhibition of his paintings held in 1913 at the Bernheim Jeune Gallery in Paris. “I have labored uniquely with color – its rhythms, its contrasts, and certain directions motivated by color masses….It is from an ensemble of colors poised around a generative color that form must spring.” Still Life Synchromy with Nude in Yellow is one of the paintings Russell showed at the Paris exhibition. It is unique even among his Synchromies because its oval composition is imposed on a rectangular canvas, with the corners painted as a mock frame. All of the forms in the painting are conveyed by a Synchromist explosion of opposing masses of hot and cold – push and pull – colors.  (For Grades K-2) Which primary colors do you see in this painting? Secondary colors? Name the different lines that you see in this painting. How do these lines make you feel? How do you think the artist felt when he made this painting? What makes you say that? What does this painting remind you of? (For Grades 3-5) Which primary colors do you see in this painting? Secondary colors? Do you see any figures in the painting? Where? What do they look like? Which adjectives would you use to describe this painting? How does this painting make you feel? Why? If you could change the name of this painting, what would you call it? Why? |
||
| |
||
  |
||
Morgan Russell United States, 1886-1953 Still Life Synchromy with Nude in Yellow Oil on canvas, 1913 Museum purchase through the Earle W. Grant Endowment Fund 1973:22 © San Diego Museum of Art |
||
| Explore
Art page (kid-friendly) |
||
© 2005 CARE All rights reserved