Stanton's older brother, Willard Huntington Wright, was a writer and critic who gained international fame in the 1920s by writing the Philo Vance detective novels under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine.

[4] During these years Macdonald-Wright and Russell developed Synchromism (meaning "with color"), seeking to free their art form from a literal description of the world and believing that painting was a practice akin to music that should be divorced from representational associations.

[4] Macdonald-Wright collaborated with Russell in painting abstract "synchromies" and staged Synchromist exhibitions in Munich in June 1913, in Paris in October 1913, and in New York in March 1914.

While in Europe, Macdonald-Wright met Matisse, Rodin, and Gertrude and Leo Stein, and Thomas Hart Benton, who called Stanton "the most gifted all-around fellow I ever knew".

In 1915, Stanton's brother, by that time a respected editor and critic in the New York literary world, published one of the first and most comprehensive surveys of advanced art to appear in the United States.

Synchromism itself, the subject of a lengthy, adulatory chapter, is presented as that desired end-point, the culmination of the modernist struggle, surpassing the work of "lesser Moderns" like Kandinsky and the Futurists; at no time does the author acknowledge his own brother as one of the two originators of that school of art.

However, I still adhered to the fundamental laws of compsiition (placements and displacements of mass, as in the human body in movement) and created my pictures by means of color-form, which, by its organization in three dimensions, resulted in rhythm.