Mystery writer S.S. Van Dine was his brother.  At fifteen young Stanton rebelliously went to sea on a windjammer, and got so seasick that he was put off at Hawaii.  Private detectives sent by his father brought him back home.  His family solved his wanderlust by sending him off to Paris at sixteen to study art at the Sorbonne and the Beaux Arts, Colarossi and Julian Academies. 

He and Morgan Russell developed the style they called Synchromism.  The idea was that color generates form.

Returning to the United States, he lived in New York from 1914 to 1919, and then returned to Los Angeles where he turned from Synchromism to a more Oriental style.  He also produced the first full-length motion picture in color.

MacDonald-Wright was a man given to confounding the experts.  Art critics pronounced him through at thirty; his doctors, unable to diagnose a mysterious illness, gave up his case as hopeless at forty-seven.  Both doctors and critics were wrong.  He painted for many years with a rich, more serene art, with formal soaring movements and pure color that suggest visualized orchestral music.

In the 1930s, he was a seven-states regional director of the WPA art program, and one of his commissions was a very large mural of the Santa Monica Public Library.  From 1942 to 1952 he taught iconography at the University of California at Los Angeles and after retiring divided his time between Los Angeles and Kyoto, Japan.

He died in 1973.

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