Au Café (Synchromy) first appears to be a purely abstract painting. Upon closer inspection, however, two figures emerge. In the upper half of the composition, a woman wearing a hat raises a glass toward her lips; a man sits below, his profile a sequence of overlapping color wedges.

Stanton Macdonald-Wright co-founded the art movement “Synchromism” in 1912. Synchromist paintings were based on color “scales” that were similar to musical scales. Macdonald-Wright arranged his brilliant, jewel-like pigments in staggered blocks and prismatic shapes, as if to mimic sequences of musical chords.