Morris Cole Graves

Morris Cole Graves (b. 1910)

Born in Fox Valley, Oregon, Morris Graves moved with his family to the Puget Sound region in 1918. A sickly child, he attended school intermittently. Instead of completing high school, he made the first of what would be three trips to the Orient as a seaman. Restless at home, he moved in with his aunt, who lived in Beaumont, Texas, and finished high school, where he received the only art classes of his career. With impastoed earth tones he sought in his early oils to convey his feelings for the birds, farm animals, and trees of the American Northwest. Starting in 1933 he showed regularly in the annual exhibitions of northwestern artists at the Seattle Art Museum, where he had his first one-man show, in spring 1936. At this time he began working for the Federal Art Project, and his style shifted from his early Expressionism to a more abstract Surrealism.

In the mid-1930s Graves's growing fascination with Buddhism, Daoism, and Zen was fed by his friendships with Dorothy Schumacher, the composer John Cage, and the older painter Mark Tobey. He quickly came to share Tobey's Zen approach to painting and began using gouache and ink washes on fragile Chinese and Japanese papers and learning Tobey's calligraphic technique of "white writing." In fall 1940 Graves served as an instructor at the Seattle Art Museum, where he maintained an association until 1942.

In 1940 Graves built an isolated shack at the Rock on Fildalgo, one of the San Juan Islands, where he produced a prolific body of work between 1940 and 1942, including the Inner Eye Series and Blind Bird Series. These works gained national prominence when Dorothy Miller exhibited them in "Americans 1942: Eighteen Artists from Nine States," curated for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In an ordeal brought about by his conscientious objection to military service in World War II, Graves was imprisoned in a military stockade from April to July 1942 and then again from January to March 1943. Upon his release with an honorable discharge, which he rejected, he returned to the Rock. At first he painted dark moody birds and night scenes, then the Journey Series (1943), the Joyous Young Pine Series (1943-44), the Old Pine Top Series and the Leaf Series (1944), the Crane Series (1945).

In 1946 Graves was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for study in Japan, but he was denied a military permit for civilians to enter Japan and stayed in Hawaii studying the Asian art collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts and painting the luminous Chinese Bronze Series. In 1947 he returned to the Northwest and began to build a home in Edmonds with the help of Japanese painter Yone Arashiro. After the Bouquet Series (1948-49), Graves returned to large oils and increased his use of gold grounds in the Guardian Series (1952-53). In 1954 he traveled to Japan and then to Ireland, where he chose to live, though he continued to travel widely between 1957 and 1963. During this period he produced the Ikon Series and the New Ikon Series. In 1964 he returned to the States, settling in northern California, until his death in 2001. Although Graves created realistic still lifes during the 1970s, he turned to a more abstract style to express the dynamism and turmoil of modern life.

Wounded Scoter, 1944

Watercolor and gouache on pieced rice paper, 25 x 29 3/4 in. (63.5 x 75.6 cm)

Signed and dated (lower right): . M Graves / 44

Friends Purchase Fund (1982.24)

The oeuvre of the reclusive Graves can be broadly placed in an American tradition of romantic and visionary artists that includes Albert Pinkham Ryder, Marsden Hartley, and Jackson Pollock; more precisely, it belongs to the late 1930s and 1940s regional tradition of the Northwest School of Visionary Art that includes Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson.(1) “Wounded Scoter” belongs with a number of meditative pieces created by Graves when he was living at his wilderness camp at Fildalgo during World War II. Using the bird image central to his work and a Zen-like approach to art making, he created an image characteristically marked by an elusive balance of naturalistic observation and a mystical state of mind.

Whereas in his early work Graves sought to capture the spirit of the American Northwest by depicting its birds, vegetation, and primitive agricultural utensils using earth colors and a heavy impasto in a mildly Expressionistic style, the latent mystical dimension of his feeling for nature started to coalesce when he met Dorothy Schumacher, at the Buddhist Temple in Seattle, in 1935 and the composer John Cage in 1937. Most important for his art, however, was his meeting with Mark Tobey in 1938. While Graves never formally studied with the older, more established artist, their common bond was a Zen Buddhist approach to art stressing the meditative, which "stills the surface of the mind, and lets the inner surface bloom."(2) Inspired by Tobey, Graves began to translate Oriental philosophical ideas into a pictorial language and to use the watercolor medium favored by Tobey, making his own distinctive use of the technique of "white writing" pioneered by Tobey in the mid-1930s.(3) But while Tobey resolved the calligraphy of "white writing," symbolic of "higher states of consciousness,"(4) into the picture plane, Graves most often used "white writing" as a magical visionary habitat for now-symbolic creatures. Graves articulated his visionary goals in 1942: "I paint to evolve a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality / I paint to rest from the phenomena of the external world--to pronounce it--and to make notations of its essences with which to verify the inner eye."(5)

The first works Graves produced after his World War II ordeal were the 1943 paintings “Wounded Gull” (Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) and “Wounded Gull” (Detroit Institute of Art). Bold white calligraphic strokes in gouache over dark washes of gray and white spontaneously render "nature's simple creatures confronting life's experience and their own destruction."(6) At this juncture Graves's New York dealer and friend Marian Willard challenged the despairing artist: "The world is suffering beyond compare today. It desperately needs a new spiritual reality, in order to cast off the destructive use of science and the machine. Can you help in this?"(7)

This challenge helped to precipitate one of the strongest bodies of Graves's work, of which the “Wounded Scoter” is a powerful example. The artist returned to the wilderness home he called the Rock and converted the one-room shack into a camp. He began undertaking his quest with the Journey Series, in which he made use of the image of a chalice. Graves himself explains that in the drawings “Time of Change” (1943; private collection) and Emergence (1944; private collection), he used the bird as a symbol of "searching beyond the three-dimensional experience in the extension of the journey."(8) In ”Bird in the Spirit” (1943; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), we see the bird engulfed in a spiritual light; in “In the Night” (1943; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), it is immersed in darkness. Sometimes the darkness is simply that of the night and nature's night sounds as Graves experienced them at the Rock. But the darkness is also that of the war. The despair that arose as the war dragged on gave rise to “War Maddened Bird Following Saint Elmo's Fire” (1944; private collection), and to two versions of “Wounded Scoter”, of which the New Britain work is the first.

In Wounded Scoter, one long sweeping gesture suggests the head, neck, and wing of the bird and activates the golden brown ground of the paper. Thus Graves set a range of visual rhythms into play. Conveying sensations of both stasis and flight, he used the short vertical of the bird's stoic balance on its webbed foot and the upward sweep of the diagonal from lower left to upper right, joining the static body to the upward thrust of the head. The diagonal of would-be flight is emphatically broken by the pink of the wounded black wing at the center of the composition. There, paradoxically, Graves generated another, even stronger sensation of flight: the beautiful but only imaginary flight of the purposeful "white writing" of feathers blown back and to the upper left of the composition. Center, symmetry, and crossing visual rhythms amplify the inscrutable paradoxes of desire and reality, of wound and vision. These forms and themes were to be repeated in the watercolor “Wounded Scoter No. 2” (1944; Cleveland Museum of Art), asserting more clearly the visionary dimension of the image. With striking formal power these works can be said to communicate moments "in the process of consciousness transforming itself to higher levels of realization or knowledge."(9)

ELL

Bibliography:

Kenneth Rexroth, "The Visionary Painting of Morris Graves," “Perspectives USA”, no. 10 (winter 1955): 58-66; Frederick S. Wight, “Morris Graves”, exhib. cat. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956); “Morris Graves: A Retrospective”, exhib. cat. (Eugene: University of Oregon Museum of Art, 1966); Ida E. Rubin, ed., “The Drawings of Morris Graves, with Comments by the Artist” (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1974); Ray Kass, “Morris Graves: Vision of the Inner Eye”, exhib. cat. (Washington, D.C.: Phillips Collection, 1983); Theodore F. Wolff, “Morris Graves: Flower Paintings” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994).

NOTES:

. The broadest tradition of modern mystical art in which Graves can be placed is surveyed in Maurice Tuchman, "Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art," in “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985”, exhib. cat. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Abbeville Press, 1986), pp. 17-61, esp. p. 51. On Pacific Northwest Coast Visionary artists, see “Northwest Traditions”, exhib. cat. (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1978).

2. George M. Cohen, "The Bird Paintings of Morris Graves," “College Art Journal” 18 (fall 1958): 4.

3. Kass, “Morris Graves”, p. 30.

4. Mark Tobey, "Mark Tobey Writes of His Painting on the Cover," “Art News” 44 (January 1-14, 1946): 22.

5. Quoted in Dorothy C. Miller, ed., “Americans 1942: Eighteen Artists from Nine States”, exhib. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1942), p. 51.

6. Ibid., p. 38.

7. Marian Willard to Morris Graves, July 14, 1943, quoted in ibid., p. 39.

8. Quoted in Rubin, “Drawings of Morris Graves”, p. 74.

9. Kass, “Morris Graves”, p. 40.