Self-Portrait
Framed: 21 7/8 x 17 7/8 x 1 3/8 inches (55.56 x 45.4 x 3.49 cm)
A Retrospective Showing of the Work of Stanton Macdonald-Wright: A Loan Exhibition, Possibly Los Angeles County Museum, January 19– February 19, 1956, no. 9.
Stanton Macdonald-Wright: Paintings, 1903–1973, ARCO Center for Visual Art, Los Angeles, September 25–November 3, 1979, no cat.
Stanton Macdonald-Wright Returns, University of Southern California Atelier Gallery in the Santa Monica Place, November 16, 1985–January 12, 1986, no cat.
The Artists of California: A Group Portrait in Mixed Media, Oakland Museum, Calif., November 14, 1987– July 24, 1988 (traveled), unnumbered.
Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, March 4–July 3, 2001; August 5–October 28, 2001; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, December 2, 2001–February 24, 2002 (Raleigh and Los Angeles only), no. 1.
Stanton Macdonald-Wright painted this self-portrait in Paris, where he and other American painters engaged with the revolutionary ideas promoted by European artists in the early 1900s. These artists included the French painter Paul Cézanne. Compare Self-Portrait to Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. Macdonald-Wright echoes Cézanne’s noticeable brushwork, diagonal strokes of paint and dark outlining of forms. Both artists chose a somewhat abstract style of painting to present their individual views of the world.
to (Joseph Chowning Gallery, San Francisco, by 1987);
to (Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, Mo., 1989);
to Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, Kansas City, Mo., 1989;
to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo., 1989.
Henry Clausen, “Recollections of SMW,” American Art Review 1 (January–February 1974), 56.
David S. Rubin, “Stanton Macdonald-Wright,” Arts Magazine 54 (December 1979), 9.
“Stanton Macdonald-Wright Returns,” Atelier (School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California), Winter 1985, 10.
The Artists of California: A Group Portrait in Mixed Media, exh. cat. (Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Museum, 1987), unpaginated.
Laura Caruso, “O’Keeffe’s Itinerant ‘Jonquils’ Pauses at Art Institute,” Kansas City Star, February 10, 1991, J4.
Henry Adams, Handbook of American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1991), 162–63.
“A Formidable Man,” Santa Monica Mirror 3 (August 1–7, 2001), 1.
Will South et al., Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, exh. cat. (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001), 17–18, 171.
Margaret C. Conrads, ed. The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Kansas City, Mo.: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 1: 21, 382-84 (repro.), 2: 161 (repro.).
Justin Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), unpaginated (repro.).
