With financial help from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, whom he met at the League in January 1906, he traveled to Europe to study art in Paris and Rome.

Returning to Paris in 1909, he studied at Matisse’s art school, frequented Gertrude Stein's salon, and met Picasso and Rodin.

[2] In Paris, Russell met Stanton Macdonald-Wright, a fellow expatriate, in 1911, and soon after the two began developing theories about color and its primacy in the creation of a meaningful work of art.

Like other young adventurous artists of the time, they had come to view academic realism as a dead-end and were pondering the possibilities of an art form that might minimize or even abandon representational content.

They were particularly interested in the theories of their teacher, Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart, who believed that colors could be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony.

Like other young modernists eager to make a name for themselves, they issued a manifesto broadcasting their goals, plastered the kiosks of Paris with notices of their show, and hoped to create a sensation.

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.

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.

[5] 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.