Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Self-Portrait, c. 1907-1909
Stanton Macdonald-Wright (American, 1890 - 1973)
Self-Portrait, c. 1907-1909
Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 15 5/8 inches (49.85 x 39.69 cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, F89-39
Very few paintings survive from Macdonald-Wright’s early years in Paris, so this is an important document. It was acquired by Crosby Kemper from Myra Morgan, a legendary local art dealer, who in the early 1960s sold amazing Pop Art by figures like Warhol and Johns to Kansas City collectors. It’s surely one of the paintings that Macdonald-Wright showed to Thomas Hart Benton in Paris, shortly after they first met at the Café du Dome. “Their bravura, their confident brush stroking, took my breath,” Benton later recalled.
Bibliography
Henry Adams, Handbook of American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri,1991, p. 163.
Henry Adams, "Benton's 'Closest Friend' Enters Collection," Calendar of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, March l99l, p. 3.