George L. K. Morris (1905–1975)

 

A descendant of General Lewis Morris, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, George L.K. Morris studied art and literature at Yale University before proceeding to the Art Students League, where he was a pupil of John Sloan. Thereafter Morris studied with Fernand Léger and Amedée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne in Paris, an experience that profoundly shaped his aesthetic outlook. In Léger, Morris located an ideal embodiment of modernism, an artist whose Cubist-derived compositions retained a strong figurative identity while stretching the formal vocabulary of art.

    Along with his wife Suzy Frelinghuysen, Morris divided his time among homes in New York City, the Berkshires, and Paris. The couple’s luxurious lifestyles masked their serious  commitment to art and—in the case of Morris—art criticism. In 1937 Morris became the first art critic for the newly restructured Partisan Review, edited by Williams Philips and Philip Rahv, which Morris financed until 1942. In his exhibition reviews, Morris—taking his cues from British critic Clive Bell’s notion of “significant form”—espoused a formalist view of art, insisting that painting and sculpture aspire to a state of purity and be purged of any reference to politics or social upheaval. During the Depression, in which his art and ideas unfolded, this position (which was shared by his fellow members of the AAA) was deemed wildly elitist, the outgrowth of his privilege and class—a claim obviously not leveled at his less affluent but equally avant-garde colleagues.

    Abhorring the narrative and populist orientation of Social Realist and Regionalist art—which dominated the art market in the 1930s—Morris remained a passionate advocate for American modernism. In the late 1930s he publicly denounced the aesthetic views of several conservative critics who derided abstract art. In addition, he joined a number of artists’ organizations and became a founding member of the AAA. Moreover, in 1937 he co-founded the French-English journal Plastique with Gallatin, Jean Arp, Sophie Taueber-Arp and César Domela, and in 1940 he picketed the Museum of Modern Art—which was refusing to exhibit the work of American abstract artists—for its perceived Eurocentric orientation.

    Morris was no longer active as a critic after 1952, but his allegiance to American abstraction never waned. His own painting and sculpture from the early 1930s onwards were defined by geometric stasis and calm, characteristics he sometimes mixed with quirky references to indigenous and popular aspects of American culture. His art’s precise, careful forms and cool linearity recall elements of works by Léger and Gris, but Morris transformed such features, infusing them with his own singularity.