Morgan Russell

Book by Kushner, Marilyn S.

Aided by monthly stipends from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Morgan Russell (1886-1953), a New Yorker working in Paris, pioneered the short-lived Synchromistok movement with his friend Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Their swirling discs of color--exploding spectrums abuzz with rhythm and movement--blazed an indelible impression on modernist abstraction. But Russell, a pupil of Matisse, finally reached an impasse with his "Synchromies." He then sought inspiration in religion and classical music, but eventually retreated to a farm in the French countryside and shifted to a figurative style. His female nudes are mythic goddesses; his male nudes, inspired by heroic figures from Leonardo and Titian, are idiosyncratic, as are the later monumental figural and religious compositions. Kushner, a curator at the Montclair Art Museum, N.J., has penned an eye-opening monograph, scanning all facets of an artist who deserves to be better known.
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