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Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art acknowledges it resides on the ancestral territory of the Osage, Kaw, and Otoe-Missouria, among other tribal nations forcibly moved to the region such as the Shawnee, Wyandot, Delaware, Potawatomi, Sac and Fox and Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) nations. We recognize and support the continued vibrancy of Native communities and cultures today who continue to thrive, as well as the inherent sovereignty of tribal nations. We are compelled to serve and advocate for these communities in accordance with our public mission.

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For this week's Kemper x KU: Collection Spotlights, we're featuring writings from Angela K. Rouse on Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Introspection and Alessia Serra on Ralston Crawford, Turbine Shafts, Coulee Dam #2 as a part of the ongoing series about the Kemper Museum Collection. This series is in collaboration with the University of Kansas.

Collection Spotlights: Willem de Kooning, Untitled and Philip Pearlstein, Two Models on Kilim Rug with Mirror

Introspection

Macdonald_Wright_Introspection.pdf

While in Paris in 1913, American artists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell co-founded a new abstract painting style they called Synchromism, meaning “with color.”[1] At its core, Synchromism sought to create compositional harmonies, visually, through the specific placement of unblended notes of color alongside one another, like the musical notes within a chord combined to generate a harmonious symphony.[2]

The Synchromists created both completely abstract paintings and ones with recognizable subject matter. With Introspection, painted fifty years after the founding of Synchromism, Macdonald-Wright returned to the more abstract tenets of the movement. His work achieves a balanced, melodious composition through sections of color juxtaposed to their approximate opposites on the color wheel, though he avoided using purely complementary colors. The artist places highly saturated larger shapes in hues of red, blue, and orange, divided by angular lines, in the upper right, center, and lower left of the composition. He combines these shapes with smaller, segmented disks in less saturated tones. Traces of the canvas texture are visible at the seams between colors, while a mild impasto quality shows in some other areas. The overlapping disks, introduced at the upper left canvas quadrant, angle downward across the painting, appearing to trail behind the larger shapes, which creates depth, balance, and circular movement within the composition.

Composition and color culminate to create several possibilities of discerning an abstract figure within the picture. Might one see a minimalist body, in profile, appearing to enact the “thinker’s pose,” as a balled fist in cobalt nears a strong chin of similar hue? Or rather, does one spy an angled face with two whirling sapphire eyes beneath pale circular curls staring from the canvas? Though one may fail to see a figure within the painting, the title itself is the artist’s challenge to assess one’s emotions when studying his work. Macdonald-Wright would ask the viewer whether they were “deeply moved by purely rhythmic forms,” as he himself claimed to be.[3] The emotional quality of his paintings, he felt, stemmed from the compositional rhythm and harmony he created through the Synchromism technique based on color theories from Aristotle, Newton, Chevreul, and others, combined with observations of the Impressionists’ and Post Impressionists’ use of color.[4] Cubism, too, he acknowledged as influential, in terms of the segmented color treatment of a subject, though he claimed, unlike the Cubists, to use color alone as his compositional guide.[5]

In Paris, at nineteen, Macdonald-Wright found influence and inspiration to develop his artistic convictions in studies under the Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart alongside Morgan Russell, his soon-to-be Synchromism compatriot.[6] However, after their work in developing their artistic movement, followed by several exhibitions in Europe, Macdonald-Wright returned to California in 1920. Disappointed to find himself constrained by the very Synchromism he had created, he sought, in his own words, “an artistic form free of all limitations.”[7]

In his thirty-year quest, he traveled, studied, taught, wrote, exhibited and painted prolifically, incorporating Asian elements into his work.[8] Ultimately, Macdonald-Wright achieved freedom of artistic expression by evolving Synchromism to sanction the deviation from spectral color, while creating paintings that were, by his own definition, “both abstract and not abstract.”[9]

Macdonald-Wright created a variety of works drawing from a multitude of influences and styles over the course of his life. Introspection marries the best of his early Synchromism style—his pervasive love of color, in a varied spectral form—with a more mature freedom that accepts ambiguity in his composition.

Angela K. Rouse
MA Student in Art History, University of Kansas
Fall 2025

[1] Will South, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism (North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001), 1.
[2] South, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, 56.
[3] Stanton Macdonald-Wright and National Collection of Fine Arts, The Art of Stanton Macdonald-Wright (National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Press, 1967), 12.  
[4] South, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, 29-31.
[5] South, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, 28.
[6] South, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, 31.
[7] Macdonald-Wright and National Collection of Fine Arts, The Art of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, 17.
[8] Carrie A. Butts, “An Old Pond, a Frog Leaps in the Sound of Water: Stanton Macdonald-Wright,” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 316, no. 8 (2016): 800-801.
[9] Macdonald-Wright and National Collection of Fine Arts, The Art of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, 16.  

Artwork Credit: (left) Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973, American), Introspection, 1963, Oil on canvas, 60 x 35 inches, Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, 1995.070.01. © Estate of Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Photograph courtesy of Dan Wayne

Turbine Shafts, Coulee Dam #2

Crawford_Turbine Shafts_Serra.pdf

Ralston Crawford, Turbine Shafts, Coulee Dam #2

Ralston Crawford’s Turbine Shafts, Coulee Dam #2 distills industrial forms into a cool geometric abstraction. The painting depicts the turbine shafts of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River—structures that generate power from the force of water. Through repetition of sharp-edged and simplified shapes, Crawford transforms these monumental machines into a tight assembly of vertical planes. He renders each element without extraneous detail or visible brushstrokes, reducing the subject to its essential properties. The downturned curvature of the bands around some of the shafts creates the illusion of looking at them from below, hinting at the imposing scale of the structures. The towering shafts seem to have no beginning or end, forming an impenetrable wall that evokes the alienating effects of industrialization.

Through both its subject matter and formal qualities, Turbine Shafts relates to Precisionism, an artistic movement with which Crawford was associated in the 1930s. Precisionists employed geometric shapes, clear outlines, and smooth paint application, and frequently depicted American modern infrastructure.[1] Turbine Shafts differs from earlier Precisionist works, however, in its suggestion of ambivalence towards industry.

The painting originates from a late-1960s commission from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Crawford was sent to the Grand Coulee Dam during the construction of its third powerhouse to produce artworks that presented a positive view of the Bureau’s actually harmful efforts to utilize and control waterways.[2] Since its erection in the 1930s, the dam has disrupted native salmon runs and spawning grounds relied upon by Indigenous communities and has displaced residents.[3] While few criticized these impacts in its early years, the environmental activists of the 1960s and 1970s began to speak out against the dam.[4] The Bureau sought to counter this negative attention by commissioning artists whose works were intended for nationwide exhibition to reframe public perception.[5]

Crawford created four paintings following his tour—the second of which is owned by the Kemper—that repeat and reconfigure components of the dam, exemplifying his practice of re-ordering and recombining visual elements.[6] He made no preparatory sketches but instead referred to black-and-white photographs he shot during his site visit. He adapted certain photographic qualities for his paintings, such as the sharp contrast of light and shadow and the cropping of the subject seen here.[7]

Crawford’s use of the camera was not his only connection to machinery and, by extension, industry. He spent his early years working on a steamer ship, later served as the chief of the Visual Presentation Unit during World War II, and was also present for and documented the nuclear weapons tests of Operation Crossroads.[8] His postwar art increasingly explored the sentiment that destruction was one of the defining features of the modern age.[9] His works dealing with industry and the machine grew more abstract and ambivalent.[10] 

In this context, it is reasonable to infer a conflicted attitude toward industry in Turbine Shafts, Coulee Dam #2. Throughout his career, Crawford emphasized that he chose subjects that made him feel, and that his works were charged with emotional weight and tension.[11] One might speculate that, notwithstanding the agenda of his government commission, he was personally engaged with the concerns of the environmental movement and allowed these to inform his portrayal of the turbines. By presenting them as looming, cold, and impenetrable, he emphasizes not industrial progress, but the alienating distance between human and machine.

MA Student in Art History, University of Kansas

[1] Jessica Murphy, “Precisionism,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 1, 2007, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prec/hd_prec.htm.
[2] U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, “Museum Property,” https://www.usbr.gov/museumproperty/art
[3] “Legislation to Compensate Spokane Tribe for Lands Lost with Construction of Grand Coulee Dam Clears Congress,” Columbia Basin Bulletin, Newstex, November 7, 2023, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/legislation-to-compensate-spokane-tribe-for-lands-lost-with-construction-of-grand-coulee-dam-clears-congress/; and Becky Kramer, “Interior Secretary Zinke Wants Spokane Tribe Compensated for Loss of Land, and Lifestyle to Grand Coulee Dam,” Spokesman-Review, March 22, 2018, https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/mar/22/interior-secretary-zinke-wants-spokane-tribe-compe/.
[4] Gene Johnson, “Northwest Dams Have Devastated the Region’s Native Tribes, U.S. Government Acknowledges,” PBS NewsHour, June 18, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/northwest-dams-have-devastated-the-regions-native-tribes-u-s-government-acknowledges; Blaine Harden, “The Grand Coulee: Savior for Whites, Disaster for Indians,” Alicia Patterson Foundation, May 19, 1993, https://aliciapatterson.org/blaine-harden/the-grand-coulee-savior-for-whites-disaster-for-indians/; and Nathanael Johnson, “When Environmentalists Busted Up Dams, Coal Moved In,” Grist, February 27, 2019, https://grist.org/article/when-environmentalists-busted-up-dams-coal-moved-in/.
[5] U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, “Museum Property.”
[6]  William C. Agee, Ralston Crawford (Hudson Hills Press, 1999), 14
[7]  Agee, Ralston Crawford, 15.
[8]  “Ralston Crawford Painting,” Museum Minute, WUGA, March 15, 2024, https://www.wuga.org/show/museum-minute/2024-03-15/ralston-crawford-painting.
[9]  Agee, Ralston Crawford, 10.
[10]  “Interview with John Crawford, Son of Ralston Crawford, 1988,” Phillips Collection Archives, https://www.phillipscollection.org/sites/default/files/2024-01/interview-john-crawford-1988.pdf.
[11]  Edward H. Dwight, Ralston Crawford (Milwaukee Art Center, 1958), 9-10. 

Artwork Credit: (Right) Ralston Crawford (1906-1979, American), Turbine Shafts, Coulee Dam #2, 1971, Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches, Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of the William T. Kemper Charitable Trust, UMB Bank, n.a., Trustee, 2001.7. © Estate of Ralston Crawford/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Kemper x KU: Collection Spotlights: Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Introspection and Ralston Crawford, Turbine Shafts