George L.K. Morris Art

Medium: original lithograph. This lithograph is from the rare 1951 "Improvisations" portfolio, published by the Artists Equity Association of New York on the occasion of the 1951 Spr...

Modern artist George L.K. Morris created this abstract biomorphic nonobjective plaster sculpture during the WPA era of the 1930s / 40s. Monogrammed. Though George Lovett Kingsland Morris studied with realist painters John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League, the influence of their points of view was replaced by that of abstractionists Amedee Ozenfant and Fernand Leger. The paintings of Morris were two-dimensional, hard-edged and brightly colored. Born in New York City in 1905, Morris became a full-fledged abstractionist and a founder in 1936 of the American Abstract Artists. He edited "The World of Abstract Art, the group's publication, and was their president from 1948-1950. Morris had graduated from Yale in 1928 and studied at the League until 1930, when he went to Paris to attend the Academie Moderne. A sculptor, writer, art critic and teacher in addition to abstract painter Morris himself later taught at the Art Students League from 1943-1944, as well as St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, 1960-1961. Morris' intrinsic abstract bent was made even clearer by his positive feeling for Hans Arp's sculpture. He and Arp edited the French art magazine, "Plastique." Morris also edited the "Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art" and "Partisan Review." He died in 1975 in New York City. George LK...

Gouache on paper, 18 7/8 x 14 3/4 in. Signed (at lower right): Morris; (with monogram, on the back): GLKM [monogram] / 1932 [sic] Executed circa late 1940s A passionate advocate of abstract art during the 1930s and 1940s, George L. K. Morris was active as a painter, sculptor, editor, and critic. An erudite man with an internationalist point of view, Morris eschewed the social, political, and figural concerns that preoccupied so many artists of Depression-era America, believing that painters should focus their attention on the beauty, refinement, and simplicity of pure form instead. His goal, he said, was “to wedge the expression further and further into the confines of the canvas until every shape takes on a spatial meaning” (as quoted in Ward Jackson, “George L. K. Morris: Forty Years of Abstract Art,” Art Journal 32 [Winter 1972–73], p. 150). Born into an affluent family in New York City, Morris was a descendent of General Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. From 1918 until 1924, he attended the Groton School in Connecticut, studying classics and art. He continued to focus on literature and art while attending Yale University (1924–28), an experience that prepared him well for his future activity as an artist-critic. After graduating in 1928, Morris studied at the Art Students League of New York, working under the realist painters John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller, as well as Jan Matulka, the only modernist on the faculty. In the spring of 1929, Morris traveled to Paris with Albert E. Gallatin, a family friend and fellow painter who introduced him to leading members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Hélion, and Piet Mondrian. Morris also took classes at the Académie Moderne, studying under Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant, important exponents of Synthetic Cubism who influenced his aesthetic development. Indeed, after experimenting with the simplified forms of Modernism for a few years, Morris moved on to abstraction by 1934, adopting a hard-edged, geometric approach inspired by Leger’s cubist style and the biomorphic shapes of Arp and Joan Miró. Following his return to New York in 1930, Morris built a white-walled, open-spaced studio (inspired by that of Ozenfant, which had been designed by Le Corbusier) on the grounds of Brockhurst, his parents’ 46-acre estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1935, he married the painter and collagist Estelle “Suzy...