Tuesday, May 11, 2021 – ABSTRACT ART WITH A WONDERFUL APPEAL
TUESDAY, MAY 11, 2021
The
360th Edition
From the Archives
GEORGE L.K. MORRIS
&
Suzy Frelinghuysen
ARTISTS
FROM
THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART
MUSEUM
&
Frelinghuysen Morris
House & Studio
- George L. K. Morris, Posthumous Portrait, 1944, oil on fiberboard and plaster relief, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.67
- Posthumous Portrait is Morris’s eulogy for the Paris he knew before the Germans occupied the city in World War II. The collage style recalls the heady days when Picasso and Braque experimented with Cubism and broke the old rules of art. By 1944 the freedom that they, Morris, and a generation of artists and writers had known was gone.
Morris’s abstract shapes suggest a great, helmeted head in a space filled with smaller soldiers and two stick figures of falling bodies. The sharp-edged rectangle on the right side of the face, and a much smaller one above, suggest bayonets. Bits of words cut off by these elements appear to spell “Boulangerie d’Alençon,” perhaps a favorite bakery from Morris’s Paris days.
Morris made several abstract paintings about the war in Europe. Like other artists who had been politically active in the 1930s, he felt he could do little but watch the devastation unfold. This work is a protest against Germany’s brutality, but it is also a retreat-—a poignant memory of better days when he and other Park Avenue Cubists enjoyed the pleasures that only Paris could provide.
Home Art + Artists Artists George L. K. Morris Copyright unknown
Name George L. K. Morris Also Known as George Lovett Kingsland Morris
Born New York, New York Died Stockbridge, Massachusetts born New York City 1905-died Stockbridge, MA 1975
Active in Paris, France Nationalities American Linked Open Data Linked Open Data URI
A writer and editor as well as a painter and sculptor, George L. K. Morris used various publications as platforms for advocating abstract art during the 1930s and 1940s. He believed that abstraction offered limitless possibilities for the twentieth century and set about to interpret new forms and ideas in historical terms so they would have special meaning for an American audience. “There is nothing new,” he maintained in a 1937 article, “about the quality that we have come to call abstract.… In great works of the past there has always been a dual achievement—the plastic, or structural, on the one hand, and the literary (or subject) on the other.” When “the veil of subject-matter had been pierced and discarded,” he continued, “the works of all periods began to speak through a universal abstract tongue.”
Morris came to his understanding of modern movements firsthand. His frequent trips to Europe and close association with leading Parisian painters and sculptors gave him special authority when arguing the historical basis of their art.
Often described as a ” Park Avenue Cubist,” Morris came from a privileged background. He attended Groton and graduated from Yale in 1928, where he studied art and literature and edited the Yale Literary Magazine. He spent the fall semesters of 1928 and 1929 at the Art Students League; in the spring of 1929 he went to Paris with Albert Gallatin and stayed after Gallatin’s departure to take Léger’s and Ozenfant’s classes at the Académie Moderne. In Paris he became a confirmed abstractionist; in his work illusionistic space in figurative paintings yielded to uptilted planes and increasingly to a Cubist fracturing of the picture plane.
On his return to New York, Morris founded a short-lived cultural and literary magazine called The Miscellany, for which he wrote intelligent and informed art criticism. He continued to travel frequently, often accompanying Gallatin to Paris to buy work for the Gallery of Living Art. He became friendly with Jean Hélion, who provided introductions to Braque, Picasso, and Brancusi, and he wrote catalogue notes to accompany Hélion’s essayfor the catalogue of the Gallery of Living Art. In 1937 he joined forces with Gallatin, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Cesar Domela, to publish an art magazine called Plastique. There, and in the pages of Partisan Review—where he served as an editor between 1937 and 1943—Morris spoke of the cyclical nature of art history and placed contemporary art squarely within a framework of historical evolution. He wrote that during the nineteenth century, when art appealed to a growing middle class insufficiently sophisticated to understand its plastic qualities, it became stuck “in the mire of realism.” With Cézanne and Seurat, who analyzed objects as shapes in space, the modern era began. The time is ripe, Morris continued, “for a complete beginning. The bare expressiveness of shape and position of shape must be pondered anew; the weight of color (and) the direction of line and angle can be restudied until the roots of primary tactile reaction shall be perceived again.” Contemporary artists, he maintained, “must strip art inward to those very bones from which all cultures take their life.”
During World War II, Morris worked as a draftsman for a naval architect’s firm. After 1947, he devoted his time almost exclusively to painting and sculpture, although he continued to write occasionally. A founding member of the American Abstract Artists, in the late 1940s he also served as the group’s president, arranging exhibitions in Europe and Japan as well as in the United States. He continued to be active with the group during the 1950s and 1960s. In Morris’s own art, Léger served as an early model. Although his work never physically resembled that of his teacher, like Léger, Morris sought a synthesis of Cubist structure and primitive form. In Morris’s work this was reflected in the incorporation of American Indian imagery.
During the mid 1930s, he argued for the concrete, and in his paintings juxtaposed hard-edged circular and angular forms in completely nonobjective compositions related to Hélion’s work of the same time. In the early 1940s, he began to reincorporate figurative imagery in his art. In his Posthumous Portrait of 1944, Morris experimented with such non-art materials as tile and linoleum embedded in painted plaster compositions.
Although Morris exhibited with some frequency during the 1930s and 1940s, his paintings and sculpture received greatest recognition after the war. He remained steadfast in his devotion to his variant form of Cubism, even though many of his friends and colleagues turned to more expressionist styles in the postwar years.
George L. K. Morris, Santo Spirito No. 2, 1951-1955, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Otto L. Spaeth, 1978.33, © 1978, Frelinghuysen Morris Foundation
George L. K. Morris, Industrial Landscape, 1936-1950, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of an anonymous donor, 1968.49
George L. K. Morris, Untitled, from the portfolio American Abstract Artists, 1937, offset lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.114.22
SUZY FRELINGHUYSEN
Suzy Frelinghuysen Suzy Frelinghuysen was born in 1911 in New Jersey and descended from a long line of clergymen and politicians. Her grandfather Frederick T. Frelinghuysen was Secretary of State under President Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Frelinghuysen was a Senator from New Jersey who opposed Jackson’s removal of the Cherokees from their land and ran as a VP candidate with Henry Clay.
Suzy was named Estelle, after her mother, but given the nickname of Suzy by her four brothers who thought their baby sister resembled a monkey they had just visited at the zoo. Suzy was educated at Miss Fine’s in Princeton and privately tutored in art and music and made childhood trips to Europe. In 1935 she married Morris who encouraged her painting and in 1938 became the first woman artist to have a painting placed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Living Art. Her principle interest remained music and after WWII she auditioned for the New York City Opera and became an instant success, singing the lead roles as a dramatic soprano in “Tosca” and “Ariadne auf Naxos” under the name Suzy Morris. She toured opera houses and recital halls in Europe and the United States. Her career was cut short with her retirement in 1951 after a bout of bronchitis. She began painting full time again, achieving some of her finest works. When asked how she reconciled the two art forms, singing and painting, she told an interviewer, “In painting, you’re concerned with the arrangement of forms. On the stage, which is your frame, you’re concerned with arranging yourself. It’s like a picture, only, of course, you’re moving.”
She died in 1988 in Lenox, Massachusetts and left instructions in her will that the house and art collection be used to further the understanding of abstract art in America.
Her work is intently sought after by private collectors and can be viewed in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Carnegie Art Institute.
THE WORKS OF THIS ARTISTIC COUPLE CAN BE SEEN AT:
Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio
92 Hawthorne St.
Lenox, MA 01240
Abstract Composition, Suzy Frelinghuysen, 1956
Composition, Suzy Frelinghuysen, 1973
Terrace, Suzy Frelinghuysen, 1958 Terrace, Suzy Frelinghuysen, 1958
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Frelinghuysen Morris
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