By the early 1950s, Macdonald-Wright's work had fallen into relative obscurity. A renewed interest in American modernism led to his gradual rediscovery and new scholarly attention, and he was given retrospectives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1956, at the Smithsonian National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C. in 1967, and at the Art Galleries of UCLA in 1970. "Synchromism and American Color Abstraction: 1910–1925," a 1978–1979 six-museum traveling exhibition originating at the Whitney Museum of American Art, was a watershed event in a revival of interest in Synchromism. In 2001–2002, a major Stanton Macdonald-Wright retrospective was shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, curated by the Synchromist scholar and Macdonald-Wright biographer Will South.