Herman Cherry, the Abstract Expressionist painter (1909-1992) began his long and multi-faceted art career on the West Coast, first studying with the Synchromist painter and cutting-edge Modernist Stanton MacDonald-Wright at the Art Students League of Los Angeles in 1926 and by 1930 migrating for a spell to New York and studying under the famed American Scene Regionalist and raconteur Thomas Hart Benton.

“It wasn’t that he taught me color,” recalled Cherry in describing the Snychromist’s influence, “he made me see color.”

A Los Angeles critic at the time wrote that the League under MacDonald-Wright’s watch “would become the locus of Modernist thought, teaching and inspiration in Southern California.”

It all rubbed off on the young artist in ways that helped forge his singular vision, acting as a kind of springboard from Synchromism’s interplay of color and music to new waters.

“I think when an artist gets older,” recounted Cherry to Harlan Phillips in an Archives of American Art oral…