Morrison's horizons

"George Morrison: Finding Abstraction," a concise exhibit of his work at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, offers clear evidence of this evolution. One of the most important artists to come out of Minnesota, Morrison returned to the state in 1970 and died in 2000 in Grand Marais, a mile from the Ojibway community where he was born 80 years earlier.

A third of the show's 62 pieces have never been on public display; 50 are on paper, including some sketches and studies. They show what an absorbent artist Morrison was. That he was a good student is obvious from several portrait and figure studies from his early years at the Minneapolis School of Art (later the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). An ink drawing from 1943 fully captures the physicality and mean intensity of a young man bent over a billiards shot.

That same year, Morrison went to New York City to study at the Art Students League. He based himself primarily in that city for 20 years, then taught for seven at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

The exhibit shows how in New York his work evolved quickly into fattened, elongated bodies inspired by Matisse and figures broken up into sections like cubist marionettes, clearly echoing Picasso. Elsewhere one sees Franz Kline's impact in black-and-white works full of slashing, gestural strokes.

Morrison reflected Paul Klee's cerebral delicacy in a spider-webby 1946 composition in ink and pencil that looks like tangled ship masts. Klee is also present in a spare, planets-in-space oil from 1954, called "Landscape, New York," and in ink sketches that look like limp checkerboards wafting in the wind.

A jagged figure drawing from around 1960 is a so-so effort to apply surrealist notions of spontaneous "automatic drawing." A big acrylic abstraction of raggedy-edged color fields, from the same period, could have been done by a student of Hans Hofmann.

Many artists achieve competent derivations from one style, or combination of styles, without ever becoming original. George Morrison was on his way to becoming exactly that kind of second-echelon artist when, in 1970, he took a teaching job at the University of Minnesota. Maybe it was coincidence, but at about that time certain elements in his art began to settle into a more consistent whole.

For example, Morrison opened up more fully to the spirit of place. He had always gravitated toward large bodies of water, whether on Cape Cod or the Côte d'Azur. But now he reconnected not just to Lake Superior but to its coastline, full of what he once called "the poetry of rocks."

To help express this sense of place, he increasingly used a simple horizon line that he could combine harmoniously with an otherwise abstracted image. His four "Red Rock Variations" from 1990, acrylic and pastel on paper, were inspired by the view out over Lake Superior from his North Shore home. Their shimmering, changing beauty recalls the transformative optical sensitivity that Claude Monet displayed in his haystack paintings.

The older Morrison also began to reflect more on his American Indian origins. He created his own abstracted version of totem poles, represented in this exhibit by a smallish cube of beautifully polished, curving wooden pieces that intersect as in a jigsaw puzzle. The same smooth surface is found on the 1987 "Chiringa Form (Small #1)." Made of two kinds of wood joined at a horizon line, the rounded sculpture tapers gradually to its edges like an arrowhead or tomahawk blade.

Morrison felt that Indian culture expressed itself foremost in rounded forms, rather than in rectilinear forms typical of Western societies. In the big 1976 wooden wall piece, "Cumulative Landscape," the cultures seem to intermingle, with light gray or tan rectilinear sections broken up by flowing, eruptive areas of round-cut wood. The rounder areas are more reddish-brown, a color Morrison once said he associated with "Indianness."

Oddly enough, a 1949 pencil and pastel abstraction in the show, suggestive of geological strata, contains many elements of Morrison's mature style. Maybe he was too busy with other artistic ideas to recognize its importance at the time. Luckily, George Morrison kept making art long enough to find and express the vision that was his alone.

Doug Hanson writes frequently on the visual arts.