sensation. Russell also began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913. Synchromism was an early innovation in pure abstraction, which was developed primarily by Russell with contributions from Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Other American painters in Paris experimenting with Synchromism at the time included Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Dasburg, and Patrick Henry Bruce, all of whom were friends with Russell and Macdonald-Wright. Bruce was also friendly with Sonia and Robert Delaunay, proponents of Orphism (a term coined in 1912 by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire). Similarities between Synchromism and Orphism led to later charges of plagiarism, which both Russell and Macdonald-Wright vehemently denied. Russell and Macdonald-Wright had high hopes for acclaim and financial success when they introduced Synchromism to the New York art world. Though Russell exhibited in the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913 and in the prestigious Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters in 1916, those hopes were never met. Art collectors, critics, and curators prior to World War I were reluctant to embrace color abstraction and, on the rare occasions when they were open to radical new styles of art, preferred the European modernism attached to names with greater cachet. The first sympathetic, extended treatment of Synchromism appeared in the book Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning, published in 1915 by Macdonald-Wright's brother, Willard Huntington Wright, a prestigious literary editor and art critic. (Stanton secretly co-authored the book, a fact that the Wright brothers were at pains to conceal.) Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning surveyed the major modern art movements from Manet to Cubism, praised the work of Cézanne and Matisse, denigrated "lesser Moderns" such as Kandinsky and the Orphists, and predicted a coming age in which abstraction would supplant representational art. Synchromism, the subject of a long, adulatory chapter, is presented in the book as the culminating point in the evolutionary process of Modernism. At no time did Wright acknowledge that he was writing about his own brother and his friend, Morgan Russell. Also, by overstating his case, Wright did little long-range good for the cause he was promoting, but his well-reviewed book did bring some informed attention to the two painters. For a time, their names appeared more frequently in the art press, and even H.L. Mencken bought a Synchromist painting, which he later donated to the Baltimore Museum of Art. By 1920, Russell and Macdonald-Wright had gone their separate ways, though Macdonald-Wright continued