MORRIS GRAVES
Tibor de Nagy
724 Fifth Ave, 12th fl
New York, NY 10019
phone: 212-262-5050
fax: 212-262-1841
www.tibordenagy.com
By RACHEL
YOUENS
Morris Graves Bouquet
(Greenhouse Plant) 1963
watercolor and tempera on paper, 16 x 12-1/2 inches
Courtesy Tibor de
Nagy Gallery, New York
The work of Morris
Graves, whose paintings explored nature through a wide range of descriptive
and muted ethereal effects, was introduced to a larger public by Dorothy
Miller in a show called "Eighteen Artists from Nine States"
at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942, the same year this west coast artist
was jailed for being a conscientious objector. And although he subsequently
became an internationally known artist, he spent long periods of time
in isolated retreats such as the one room cabin he built called 'The
Rock' on Fidalgo Island, and a place located on the land and ponds that
he restored called 'The Lake' in Northern California during the 1970s.
I had become interested
in Graves' art through reproductions I had seen as a high school student.
but when I finally saw his work in person I was unprepared for such
finely tuned and sensitive, yet strikingly modern renderings of the
natural world. Morris painted flowers, still-lifes, birds and snakes,
mandalas and dream imagery. One consistent formal idea in his work is
a dynamic between enclosed or compacted motifs and their surrounding
space, an interplay which give the paintings their emotional tension.
Graves probed nature's
inexplicable silences and its ultimate resistance to analysis. In Spirit
Bird with Minnow, which portrays the capture and devouring of a standing
bird's prey, he used the linear technique of a miniaturist to create
an exquisite texture, alongside a particularly modernist frontal contour.
Graves' stylization gave a new context to a mythical creature. In Theodore
Roethke's words:
The flesh takes
on pure poise of spirit
Acquires, for a time, the sandpiper's insouciance,
The hummingbird's surety, the kingfisher's cunning....
Meditation at Oyster River
Using beautiful
Japanese rice papers, Graves allowed the paper to frame windows filled
with weighted transparent grounds symbolic of both earth and water.
Inside these windows, carefully observed objects were created with fully
pigmented brushstrokes. These full forms have diffuse edges and a notational
quality. Like the artists Emil Nolde and Mark Tobey, Graves was interested
in Oriental art.
Morris Graves Evening
Grosbeak with Acorn Squash 1979
tempera on paper, 17-1/4 x 17-3/8 inches
Graves was influenced
by his friend John Cage, particularly his early Dadaist work, the poet
Kenneth Rexroth, whose scholarly analyses of pictograms and calligraphy
must have informed Graves thinking at many junctures, and Theodore Roethke,
who embraced nature's forms in order to purify and transform the self.
A leaf, I would love the leaves, delighting in the redolent disorder
of this mortal life,
This ambush, this silence,
Where shadow can change into flame,...
The Longing
In the painting
titled Triumph the intensely observed light effects were created with
an impasto technique. This is a sensitive rendering of twelve flowers
in various stages of bloom. Each flower is suspended above their vertical
stems which are strewn across the canvas. They float against a darkened
background, which becomes strikingly luminous yet foreboding. Alternatively,
in Space Age Mandala #2 Graves created an iconic metallic and mechanical
'compass' that again floats across and yet eclipses the reddish ground
behind it, and reads as a great sun drenched space.
There is something
of an American version of the Chinese literati artist in Graves' life.
He traveled as a merchant marine, worked for the WPA, spent winter months
drawing at Chartres, worked at Father Divine's Peace Mission in Harlem,
and designed the pavilion for the World's Fair in India. Graves art
and biography is a fascinating study of a man whose engagement with
society necessarily included urgent and repeated exile and return.
