to make efforts at selling his friend's work throughout the 1920s. Macdonald-Wright moved back to his native California and established a successful niche for himself as a charismatic figure in the Los Angeles art world. Russell, who was a cross-dresser (though married twice), never ceased painting, either, but he experienced financial difficulties and lapsed into relative obscurity. Synchromism was seldom discussed in art-history textbooks and was not the subject of any major exhibitions before the late 1950s. Gallery exhibitions of Russell's work were infrequent. After spending almost four decades in France between 1909 and 1946, Russell retired to the United States after the war and converted to Catholicism in 1947. His painting in his later years, often of nudes, was largely figurative and displayed none of the color effects he had pioneered with Synchromism. After suffering two incapacitating strokes, he died at age of sixty-seven in a nursing home in a suburb of Philadelphia in 1953. Gradually, during the last three decades of the twentieth century, long-overdue scholarly and public attention was paid to Synchromism. The Whitney Museum of American Art launched a six-museum traveling exhibition in 1978 devoted to color abstraction that brought Russell's name before the public again, and the purchase of his papers by collector Henry Reed, and the subsequent donation to and controversial retrieval of those papers from the Whitney Museum, brought his name into the news. Morgan Russell's first museum retrospective was held at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in 1990. His work is represented today in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the San Diego Museum of Art, among others. His monumental Synchromy in Orange: To Form (1914), in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, was one of the centerpieces of the 2013 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925." References Sources External links The Jean Gabriel Lemoine papers relating to Morgan Russell, 1921–1923 at the Archives of American Art are an archival collection consisting largely of letters and letter fragments written by Morgan Russell to Jean Gabriel Lemoine, art critic for L'Echo de Paris. In these letters Russell explains his art and the Synchromist style that he developed with Stanton MacDonald-Wright. 1886 births 1953 deaths 20th-century American painters Abstract painters American male painters Art Students