George Morrison
Made while Morrison was teaching in Provincetown, Massachusetts, between 1947 and 1952, Abstract Forms is included among the artist’s non-objective studies on paper characteristic of that period in his practice. Emphatically without a subject, being a purely formal experiment in line and colour, this composition pairs washes of tempera pigment in a series of interlocking forms with fine ink crosshatching. At the time in Morrison’s career, he continued to espouse the ideals of Abstract Expressionism – in abstraction, he could be a modernist, his ethnicity an incidental yet unrelated side note; in abstraction, he could shrug off the expectations of both the art world, who found his work lacking in tradeable exoticism, and other Native American artists, who found his work lacking in political urgency. Morrison’s paintings from the late 1950s onwards, however, marked a sea change. While still largely abstracted, they recall the northern shore of Lake Superior where he was raised and to which he often returned in image and being, spending the final two-and-a-half decades of his life in view of its waters. Landscape, his first subject, would also be his last, however differently expressed in a material immediacy rather than pictorial study. “There is something inside that always comes through,” the artist said in 1987. “Gradually, the landscape themes crept through into my art. The indirect influences of land, water, and wood.” But perhaps an impression of the place to which he returned near the Grand Portage Reservation was felt even among the early formal experiments to which Abstract Forms belongs –
Every moment, the horizon is present. The horizon has been an obsession with me for most of my life. It makes an indelible image that, for me, stems from being born and growing up near the edge of the lake. Later, spending many summers on the Atlantic shores reinforced it. I think of the horizon line as the edge of the world, the dividing line between water and sky, colour and texture. It brings up the literal idea of space in a painting. From the horizon, you go beyond the edge of the world to the sky and, beyond that, to the unknown.
b.1919, Chippewa City; d.2000, Red Rock
For much of his life, George Morrison felt himself caught between two seemingly disparate poles: avant-garde abstraction and what was then termed ‘Indian’ art. His early career, which saw him leave both his native Minnesota and the landscape paintings of his youth for New York’s Ab-Ex scene in 1943, was marked by a conscious distancing of his indigenous inheritance. That the scene was largely insular, and its members almost exclusively white and male, did not temper Morrison’s modernist ambitions. A few years following his arrival in the city, a painting of his was rejected from a show of Native American art on the grounds that it did not adequately represent his cultural background (the work being nonrepresentational and without the motifs that came to characterise the genre). This appears only to have affirmed his suspicion of the label ‘Indian’ as reductive and constraining. What followed was a hugely productive, migratory period, in which Morrison travelled to France and taught at educational institutions across the States, before returning to his ancestral home in 1970. While he did not initially believe in an essential connection between Indigenous culture and contemporary art, he later reconciled his Ojibwe heritage with modernism towards a distinct visual grammar. By then, the artist’s material and aesthetic enquiries, which had long denied an object, had come to rest on a lasting subject: the phenomenology of place, an experience of being in and of the land. As he reflected in a 1972 artist statement:
My own work falls in a direction of art that my type of experience and training gives – into the mainstream of the avant-garde of American art. My own sensibilities, the influences, and the attitudes that shaped my art were broad in scope. I have never painted the so-called Indian themes; I have never been social[ly] conscious in my painting; I have never tried to prove that I was Indian [through] my art; yet, there may remain deeply hidden some remote suggestion of the rock whence I was hewn, the preoccupation of the textual surface, the mystery of the structural and organic element, the enigma of the horizon, or the colour of the wind.