Flight of the Butterfly No. 1 (Vol de Papillon)
1955
Stanton Macdonald-Wright
As exemplified by Flight of the Butterfly, Macdonald-Wright's late style is, concerned with light and translucency. One can partly attribute this lyricism to the artist's devotion to Buddhism and Japanese art. Even the title alludes to a Zen-like appreciation of fleeting beauty.
As a young American artist in Paris, Stanton Macdonald-Wright co-founded a short-lived but influential art movement called synchromism, which proposed an abstract art based on a musical/mysti-cal interpretation of color. Returning from Europe, Macdonald-Wright eventually settled in southern California, where he became an impassioned advocate for modern art. In the last decades of his long career, he returned to color abstraction.