Bienvenue: African American Artists in France @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Bienvenue: African American Artists in France 

Michael Rosenfeld, New York

Through July 25, 2025

“There is a breadth, a generosity, an obsolete cosmopolitanism about her [France's] recognition of the fine arts, which bars no nationality, no race, no school, or variation of artistic method. All she asks is that the art shall be true, in other words that it shall set forth life.”—Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1908 [1]

“Life in Paris offers me the anonymity and objectivity to release long-stored memories of sorrow, and the beauty of the difficult effort to release and orchestrate in form and color a personal design. Being in France gives time for reflection. One never leaves home if one was never there.”—Beauford Delaney, 1966 [2]

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Bienvenue: African American Artists in France, a historical survey of seventeen Black American artists who lived and worked in France from the late nineteenth century through the present. Complementing the landmark exhibition Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950–2000, on view at the Centre Pompidou through June 30th, Bienvenue offers an expanded look into the presence of Black American artists in France, many of whom were seeking respite from the systemic racism that limited their opportunities for education and the recognition of their work in the United States. Where Paris Noir encompasses artists of the larger African diaspora working in the second half of the twentieth century, Bienvenue: African American Artists in France focuses specifically on American artists, and spans nearly eight decades in its chronological scope, beginning with a 1912 painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) and ending with a 1989 sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1934).

Bienvenue: African American Artists in France features works by Richmond Barthé (1901–1989), Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1934), Ed Clark (1926–2019), Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Harold Cousins (1916–1992), Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), Herbert Gentry (1919–2003), Sam Gilliam (1933–2022), Palmer Hayden (1890–1973), Richard Hunt (1935–2023) William H. Johnson (1901–1970), Augusta Savage (1892–1962), William Edouard Scott (1884–1964), Albert Alexander Smith (1896–1940), Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), Bob Thompson (1937–1966) and Hale Woodruff (1900–1980).

Widely regarded as the patriarch of Black American artists, Henry Ossawa Tanner remains a foremost painter of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the first Black American artist to achieve international fame. His relocation from Philadelphia to Paris in 1891 set a precedent that would inspire future generations of Black American artists to train, reside, or sojourn in France, including Harlem Renaissance master William Edouard Scott, who studied under Tanner from 1910–13. Likewise, Palmer Hayden, Augusta Savage, and Hale Woodruff each sought an audience with the elder master during their time in France in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to invaluable advice on navigating the mores of French society, Tanner also provided guidance on painting techniques and openly shared his understanding of art. In a 1970 issue of The Crisis, Hale Woodruff recalled his formative encounter with Tanner in 1928. Traveling to the small town in Picardy where Tanner lived in semi-retirement, Woodruff introduced himself to “a remarkable man of profound intelligence and scholarship,” who welcomed the young artist into his home. Upon asking who had most inspired him in the Parisian museums, Woodruff recalled Tanner’s nomination of Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne as the most important painters of the modern age, elaborating:

“Remember that light can be many things: light for illuminating an object or for creating a mood; for purposes of dramatization as in a theatrical production. For myself, I see light chiefly as a means of achieving a luminosity, a luminosity not consisting of various light-colors but luminosity within a limited color range, say, a blue or blue-green. There should be a glow which indeed consumes the theme or subject. Still, a light-glow which rises and falls in intensity as it moves through the painting. It isn’t simple to put into words.”[3]

Though the country was not free of racism, France generally afforded Black artists and intellectuals greater respect and more opportunities than the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such was the environment that prompted James Baldwin to make Paris his home in 1948, and he spent the ensuing years encouraging his good friend Beauford Delaney to join him. Delaney eventually agreed, moving from his Greene Street loft in Greenwich Village to Montparnasse in 1953. Delaney would remain in the vicinity of Paris for the remainder of his life, composing a singular body of gestural, chromatically nuanced abstractions and a celebrated series of portraits that reflect the creative and spiritual inspiration he felt in the European capital. “I left New York for Paris in 1953, and I have painted with greater freedom ever since,” Delaney wrote some ten years after leaving the United States. “I tried to paint light, different kinds of light, and my painting has been associated with ‘abstraction.’ But there are no precise limits for me between ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ paintings and I have always continued to paint portraits of friends.”[4] Beauford Delaney is a particularly strong presence in Paris Noir, which features twelve paintings by the artist, eight of which are on loan from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

While Paris has always been a cultural hub for creatives and intellectuals, many artists featured in Bienvenue traveled to the countryside or coast to paint, following the tradition of the Impressionist and modernist masters that inspired them. The exhibition offers key examples of this tradition, including maritime paintings by Palmer Hayden and a coastal scene by Tanner executed along the coast of Brittany; a seminal painting by William H. Johnson depicting the idyllic coastal town of Cagnes-Sur-Mer; a landscape portraying the island of Port-Cros off the French Riviera by Delaney; and a scene of the Eure river by Woodruff executed in Chartres.

The cosmopolitan hub of Paris was a natural attraction for Black American artists, who found the city’s architecture, social spaces, and creative circles to be rich sources of inspiration. Several works in the exhibition feature distinctly Parisian subjects, including Richmond Barthé’s iconic sculpture of Senegalese cabaret dancer Feral Benga; William Edouard Scott’s transcendent portrayal of Notre Dame; and a classic rendition of the Pont Neuf by Hale Woodruff. Parisian nightlife is likewise a recurring theme of the exhibition; in addition to Barthé’s bronze portrait of Benga, drawings by Robert Colescott and Albert Alexander Smith depicting cabaret performances are also on view.

Opportunities for education and art training were another primary draw for many artists, particularly in the postwar era. The exhibition features two abstract paintings by Ed Clark, who enrolled at L'académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1952; major sculptures by Harold Cousins, who studied at Ossip Zadkine’s studio in 1949; and a quintessential abstract painting by Herbert Gentry, who likewise studied under Zadkine and at L'académie de la Grande Chaumière in the late 1940s. Four paintings by Bob Thompson are also on view; executed during his first trip to Europe in 1961–62, these works testify to the hours Thompson spent at the Louvre and Paris’ many other museums, soaking up the compositional devices of the Old Masters and translating them into thoroughly contemporary paintings using his own unique expressionist voice.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is recognized for modern and contemporary art. Since its founding in 1989, the gallery has been committed to expanding the canon of American art by championing artists who have made vital contributions to surrealism, social realism, abstract expressionism, figurative expressionism, and geometric abstraction. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s dedication to presenting the work of nineteenth and twentieth century Black American masters is as longstanding as the gallery itself; in addition to dozens of solo exhibitions focused on Black American artists, the gallery organized the renowned annual exhibition series African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks from 1993–2003.

Notes:

[1] Henry Ossawa Tanner quoted in Dewey F. Mosby, Across continents and cultures: The Art and Life of Henry Ossawa Tanner (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1995), 7–8

[2] Beauford Delaney quoted in John Ashbery, “American Sanctuary in Paris,” ARTnews Annual vol. 31 (1966): 146

[3] Tanner quoted in Hale Woodruff, “My Meeting with Henry O. Tanner,” The Crisis (June 1970), reprinted in Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965, exh. cat. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996), 11

[4] Beauford Delaney, artist statement, “Beauford Delaney - Career as a Creative Artist,” c.1963, Beauford Delaney collection, Sc MG 59, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, New York, NY

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY

100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY, 10011

www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

Bienvenue: African American Artists in France 

Michael Rosenfeld, New York, May 10 – July 25, 2025

Related Posts:

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 

Grey Art Museum, New York University, March 2 - July 20, 2024

Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964 - 1980

Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, April 5 - July 2, 2006

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC - "Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved" Exhibition

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor 

The Search for the Beloved

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Through May 3, 2025

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved, a first-of-its-kind exhibition exploring the impact of the theories of Hungarian psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor on the art of Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990). Fodor’s 1949 book, The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning (New York:  Hermitage Press, Inc, 1949) was an early contribution to the field of prenatal psychology, and while many of his theories have lost their currency, the provocative language, vivid imagery, and theories put forth in the book provided Ossorio with, in his own words, “a springboard from which to take off.”[1] From his early surrealist drawings to his celebrated mixed-media assemblages known as Congregations, the works presented in Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved reveal Ossorio’s enduring exploration of themes addressed in Fodor’s book, notably birth, death, suffering, and sex.

In The Search for the Beloved, Nador Fodor argues that prenatal experience and the inherently traumatic upheaval of birth form the foundation of each person’s psyche, instilling in them an innate fear of death and a lifelong, subconscious desire to return to the womb. 

In the book’s introduction, Nador Fodor writes: “After nine months of peaceful development, the human child is forced into a strange world by cataclysmic muscular convulsions which, like an earthquake, shake its abode to the very foundations. … In its shattering effect, birth can only be paralleled by death.”[2]

NADOR FODOR -- Born in Beregszász, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Berehove, Ukraine) to a Jewish family in 1895, Nandor Fodor completed a doctorate in law at the Royal Hungarian University of Science in Budapest. After moving to London in 1929 to work as a journalist, Fodor became interested in the work of Sigmund Freud and began publishing his own writing in psychoanalytic journals. By 1949, when he published The Searched for the Beloved, Nador Fodor had developed a reputation as a compelling psychoanalytic thinker writing for a popular audience. Many chapters of The Searched for the Beloved were first published in scientific journals, including The Psychiatric Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychotherapy, and The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Although it is unlikely that Nador Fodor ever met Alfonso Ossorio, his theories had an indelible influence on the artist, who was a voracious reader on a wide range of subjects; notably, Ossorio kept an annotated copy of The Search for the Beloved on his bedside table until the end of his life.

ALFONSO OSSORIO -- Alfonso Ossorio was born in Manila, the Philippines, in 1916 and raised in a devoutly Catholic family. After attending Catholic boarding schools in England and a Jesuit secondary school in the United States, he attended Harvard University, where he completed his senior thesis titled Spiritual Influences on the Visual Image of Christ. Throughout his youth, Ossorio’s irrepressible feelings of same-sex attraction were in conflict with the worldview of his upbringing and the beliefs that had been ingrained in him, leading to immense inner turmoil that he expressed through vividly detailed surrealistic depictions of biblical subjects during the early 1940s. An exemplary selection of these early works is on view in Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved. Executed before the publication of The Search for the Beloved, these early drawings such as Job (1941) and The New Pandora (1944) reveal Ossorio’s lifelong interests in the themes of suffering, birth, and sex that would resonate with Fodor’s book.

Alfonso Ossorio encountered Fodor’s book at a particularly important moment in his life and career. Early in 1950, Ossorio returned to his home in the Philippines for the first time since he was ten, bringing the newly published The Search for the Beloved with him. The official purpose of Ossorio’s trip was the execution of a mural titled The Angry Christ for the Chapel of Saint Joseph the Worker, which his family had built in Victorias, on the island of Negros. The ten months Alfonso Ossorio spent in the Philippines opened up old wounds from his youth that led to a highly productive period and a new direction in his art.

Guided by his reading of The Search for the Beloved as well as his new friendships with Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, Ossorio composed his Victorias Drawings, a series of abstract paintings on paper executed with a wax-resist technique, which are prominently featured in this exhibition. Distinguished by their vivid colors and pulsating energy, the Victorias Drawings directly address the contents of Fodor’s book through titles and imagery referencing pregnancy, childbirth, coupledom, motherhood, infancy, martyrdom, and yonic forms. Created at the height of the abstract expressionist movement, the Victorias Drawings inspired Jean Dubuffet to author and publish a monographic study on the series, titled Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio—the only monograph he would ever write on another artist. In 1951, the Victorias Drawings were exhibited at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris and at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, formally announcing Ossorio’s departure from his detailed surrealist compositions of the 1940s.

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved illuminates themes manifest throughout Ossorio’s oeuvre, including his final major series: the mixed media assemblages known as the Congregations. In the Congregations, Ossorio brings together such disparate found objects as glass eyes, shells, animal bones, shards of glass, and driftwood into compositions that reveal the enduring influence of Fodor’s thought.

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved is Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s fourteenth solo exhibition on the work of Alfonso Ossorio, who has been the subject of more solo exhibitions than any other artist in the gallery’s thirty-six-year history. Beginning in 1996 with Alfonso Ossorio – Reflection & Redemption: The Surrealist Decade, 1939-1949, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has consistently presented focused, thematic exhibitions exploring various facets of Ossorio’s extraordinary career, while including his work in eighty-eight group exhibitions since 1992. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery represented the Ossorio Foundation from 1996 to 2007.

[1] Judith Wolfe, Alfonso Ossorio: 1940-1980 (East Hampton, NY: Guild Hall Museum, 1980), 43

[2] Nandor Fodor, The Search for the Beloved, (New York: Hermitage Press, Inc., 1949), 3

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY

100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY, 10011

www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York City, February 8 – May 3, 2025

Spiritual by Nature @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC

Spiritual  by  Nature
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York
June 15 - August 2, 2019

RICHARD POUSETTE-DART (1916-1992)

Suspended Light, 1978

Acrylic on linen, 72 1/8” x 54 1/8”, signed and dated

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents the group exhibition Spiritual by Nature, featuring a selection of works by artists directly inspired by the natural world and informed by Eastern thought and spirituality. This exhibition includes the work of Mary Bauermeister, William Baziotes, Joseph Cornell, Claire Falkenstein, Yayoi Kusama, Norman Lewis, Alfonso Ossorio, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodore Roszak, Charles Seliger, Theodoros Stamos, Toshiko Takaezu, Lenore Tawney, Alma Thomas, Mark Tobey, and Charmion von Wiegand. Working across a range of media and drawing on personal aesthetic vocabularies, these artists strove to find a universal language to express their singular visions of the world at large. Six of the artists on view are currently  represented  in  Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Artistic License is the first-ever artist-curated exhibition mounted at the Guggenheim and the inclusion of these artists is a testament to their continuing relevance and impact.

This exhibition is presented concurrently to Calix, Cup, Chalice, Grail, Urn, Goblet: Presenting the Sexual Essence of Morris Graves.

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY
100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY, 10011
www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

Morris Graves @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC - Calix, Cup, Chalice, Grail, Urn, Goblet: Presenting the Sexual Essence of Morris Graves

Calix, Cup, Chalice, Grail, Urn, Goblet: Presenting the Sexual Essence of Morris Graves
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York
June 15 - August 2, 2019

MORRIS GRAVES (1910-2001) 

State of the World, 1947

Gouache, watercolor, pastel and ink on paper

26” x 20”, signed

Courtesy of the Morris Graves Foundation 

and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

CALIX, CUP, CHALICE, GRAIL, URN, GOBLET

superbly presenting the sexual essence,

the reproductive–mystery elements,

the seed cup. 

The flower 

The cup (chalice) to quaff the life–flow—

the cup that invites and summons the bees and moths to savor, quaff and carry

the pollen. [1]

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Calix, Cup, Chalice, Grail, Urn, Goblet: Presenting the Sexual Essence of Morris Graves, the gallery’s third solo exhibition for Morris Graves (1910-2001). This exhibition is a seven-decade survey exploring the artist’s symbolic use of vessels in luminous, spiritual works that exemplify the essence of his mystical relationship with nature. From early oil paintings to surrealist works on paper and later quiet still-lifes, the imagery of the chalice is reflective of Morris Graves’s expansive world view.

Drawn to its sensual form, Morris Graves explained that the shape of the chalice originates from the sexual anatomy of flowers: the urn-shaped calix bears the flower’s reproductive organs, defined by the “male” pollen-bearing stamen that surrounds the “female” seed-bearing pistil. As receptacles, the calix, cup, chalice, grail, urn and goblet contain the essential matter of life and embody its cyclical rituals.

Morris Graves explained in a 1952 letter the symbolic possibilities of the chalice, calyx or cup:

As calyx: contains the flower, the potential of essential experience and renewal, and of growth.
As cup: (karmic cup) the contents of which, either pain or Spirit, traditionally is unalterable and/or cannot ultimately be rejected.
A more recent series of chalices has been used with the more individual personal meaning:
Chalice with no empty space, i.e., the cup that holds nothing.
Chalice with inturning lip, i.e., the cup that holds something back.
Chalice with division or with partition in the empty space, i.e., the cup that holds neither one opposite nor the other but both simultaneously.
Chalice on a distorted, bent, or tilted stem, i.e., the cup’s content willfully or consciously wasted.
Chalice shattered into pieces, i.e., the cup as a symbol of the negative effort to recapture the belief of Duality.
Chalice articulated out of the stuff which apparently surrounds it, i.e., the symbolizing of unity—or of the phenomenal being the illusory projection of consciousness, etc. etc., etc. [2]

The chalice was Morris Graves’s private symbol for spiritual birth and the container for the soul, a motif through which he attempted to encourage the viewer toward enlightenment. Presenting the Sexual Essence of Morris Graves charts the evolution of this recurring form as a reflection on an artist who sought spiritual life and growth in a world that he felt was defined by disruption and disintegration.

ABOUT MORRIS GRAVES

Known for contemplative, haunting images that immortalize the essence of the creatures that inspired him, Morris Graves (1910-2001) lived a life of personal exploration in harmony with nature. An important American modernist, Morris Graves achieved national and international acclaim for his visionary and spiritual works that poetically revealed the mysteries of nature. This communion with the natural world and its eloquent expression through gouache and watercolor was further inspired and influenced by Buddhism, particularly Zen, as well as the arts of East Asia and India.

One of the leading artists of the Pacific Northwest, Morris Graves spent most of his life on the West Coast, a location that had a significant impact on his artistic development. Shortly after his birth, his family moved from Fox Valley, Oregon to Seattle, WA with the hope of finding better economic opportunities. Morris Graves was stricken with pneumonia as a child and spent hours in the family garden, where his keen eye for nature first developed. In 1928, he dropped out of high school and became a merchant sailor, traveling to China, Japan, and the Philippines; he was struck with an instant affinity for East Asian culture. Upon his return to the United States, Morris Graves traveled extensively before settling in Beaumont, Texas, where he finished high school and was described in the yearbook as “a vagabond artist with a commanding mien—rushing here or there with flowers or canvas in hand.”[3] He eventually made his way back to Seattle, where he became a part of an influential artistic community that included Mark Tobey, John Cage and Merce Cunningham.

Morris Graves was largely self-taught (his education was limited to high school), but his lack of formal art training did not limit his considerable talent. In 1933, his work won first prize at the Northwest Annual Exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum – an award that led to the patronage and guidance of Dr. Richard Fuller, the museum’s founding director. In 1936, Graves had his first solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, and that same year, he began painting for the Federal Art Project. In 1940, Morris Graves participated in two group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York: 35 under 35 and Mystery and Sentiment. However, 1942 was a breakthrough year when, after visiting his studio, Marian Willard Johnson and Dorothy Miller decided to champion his art. Johnson gave him a solo show—the first of a total of fourteen dedicated to Graves—at the Willard Gallery, and Miller included his work in MoMA’s important showcase of emerging American artists, Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States. As a result of those two exhibitions, MoMA director Alfred Barr purchased an unprecedented eleven works by Morris Graves for the museum. Duncan Phillips—hailing Graves as an “original genius”[4]—also acquired several works for The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. That same year, Morris Graves was drafted into the US Army, and when his application for conscientious objector status was declined, Morris Graves spent the year in a military prison; he was released in 1943. In 1949, the artist’s work was presented at the XXIV Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; it was also included that year in the landmark traveling exhibition Milestones of American Painting in our Century, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA.

Like Mark Tobey, a close friend and confidant, Morris Graves was deeply influenced by East Asian religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Taoism. But unlike Tobey, his interests also extended to Hinduism, from which Graves drew some of his imagery. Dominated by images of birds usually surrounded by an abstract circle of color and forms, his work is strikingly silent, commanding the viewer’s intense focus. Morris Graves’s work is deeply symbolic; birds, snakes, moons, flowers all speak to the artist’s love of nature, his interest in the transcendental, and his quest for an art that would “guide our journey from partial consciousness to full consciousness.” [5] But this full consciousness was also an internal state, and while Graves painted identifiable animals and plants, his were paintings of internal images, a “vision of the inner eye.”

For Morris Graves, the mechanical cacophony of industry and technology—the airplanes that flew over his cottage, the cars that roared down streets—was a major obstacle to this journey. As part of his quest to escape the pollution of modernity, Morris Graves moved to Ireland in 1954. That same year, Life magazine featured an article on him, Tobey, and fellow Pacific Northwest artists Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan. Paradoxically, technology was the inspiration for the body of work that Graves created during the time spent in Ireland; his Instruments for a New Navigation, a series of elegantly totemic sculptures in metal, glass and stone reminiscent of celestial bodies and telescopes, were executed during the advent of the space program. Ireland proved significant for Graves’s artistic evolution; the series represented his only foray into three-dimensions and related as much to an exploration of outer space as it did to his continuing interest in the spirituality of inner space. Graves continued to travel and exhibit extensively, in group and solo shows, and in 1964, he returned to the United States and settled in Humboldt County, California.

As the monumental scale of abstract expressionism and the irony of pop art came to dominate American modernism, Morris Graves’s audience shifted internationally. In 1957, he became the first US artist to receive the Windsor Award, bestowed by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and in 1962, he visited India at the invitation of Indira Gandhi and met her father, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1983, The Phillips Collection mounted a major retrospective, Vision of the Inner Eye, which traveled to the Greenville County Art Museum, Greenville, SC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and the San Diego Art Museum, San Diego, CA. A solo exhibition focused on Graves’s early works, Morris Graves: The Early Works 1932-1938, took place in 1998 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, WA; Greenville County Museum of Art; and the Art Museum of South East Texas, Beaumont, TX. In 2000, the Humboldt Arts Council named their new museum after Morris Graves, who donated over 100 works beginning in 1991. After his death in 2001, his house “The Lake” became home of the Morris Graves Foundation, a non-profit retreat for artists.

In 2010, a solo survey dedicated to Morris Graves on the occasion of his centennial was shown at the Morris Graves Museum of Art (Humboldt Arts Council), Eureka, CA and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery mounted a concurrent exhibition, Morris Graves: Falcon of the Inner Eye: A Centennial Celebration. In 2016, Morris Graves: The Nature of Things was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. In 2013, Graves’s letters were published in a book, Morris Graves: Selected Letters, edited by Vicki Halper and Lawrence Fong and published by the University of Washington Press. That same year, his archives were made available to the public at the Knight Library in Eugene, OR.

In the last two decades, work by Graves has been consistently featured in a number group exhibitions, most notably Klange des Inneren Auges: John Cage, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves (Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves) at the Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany and the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art, Tacoma, WA (2002); Immeasurable Spaces, Incalculable Energies: Tobey, Graves, Callahan, Anderson at the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA (2003); The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2009); John Cage with Morris Graves and Mark Tobey at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2012); and Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical at the Seattle Art Museum (2014). Most recently, Graves’s work was on view in the exhibitions Peindre la nuit (Painting the Night) at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France (2018) and continuum… at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA (2019). Bird of the Inner Eye, a chamber opera based on the artist’s letters and archives and written by Joan Schirle and Gina Leishman, is currently in production and will be presented at Dell’Arte International, Blue Lake, CA in June 2020.

Major institutions with work by Morris Graves in their permanent collections include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY); Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, Canada); Art Institute of Chicago (IL); Baltimore Museum of Art (MD); Brooklyn Museum (NY); Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA); Cleveland Museum of Art (OH); Dallas Museum of Art (TX); Detroit Institute of Arts (MI); High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA); The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO); Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA); The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA); Seattle Art Museum (WA); Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); Tacoma Art Museum (WA); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); and the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University (New Haven, CT).

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery represents the Morris Graves Foundation.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has championed the work of Morris Graves for over twenty-five years and this exhibition marks twenty years since the gallery presented its first solo exhibition for the artist, Morris Graves: Toward Ultimate Reality, March 11 – May 1, 1999.

1. Morris Graves in a letter to Penelope Schmidt and Alice Gorman written at his home The Lake in Loleta, CA, [1980s], as reproduced in Vicki Halper and Lawrence Fong, eds., Morris Graves: Selected Letters (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 312

2. Morris Graves, under the pseudonym Pauline Governor, in a letter to Virginia Harriman written in Edmonds, WA, December 1, 1952, as reproduced in ibid, 280

3. Holland Cotter, “Morris Graves, Mystical Painter of Nature, Is Dead at 90,” The New York Times, May 8, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/arts/morris-graves-mystical-painter-of-nature-is-dead-at-90.html, accessed April 2010

4. Duncan Phillips as quoted in Ray Kass, Morris Graves: Vision of the Inner Eye (New York: George Braziller, 1983), 32

5. Graves, Guggenheim Fellowship Application, 1945, as cited in Kass, 50 and as quoted in Peter Selz, “Centenary Exhibition of Morris Graves,” Morris Graves: Falcon of the Inner Eye, A Centennial Celebration exh. cat. (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, 2010), 9

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY
100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY, 10011
www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

Michael Goldberg @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York - End to End: The 1950s & 2000s

Michael Goldberg 

End to End: The 1950s & 2000s

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Through March 24, 2018

Born Sylvan Irwin Goldberg in 1924 and raised in the Bronx, MICHAEL GOLDBERG (American, 1924-2007) began taking Saturday art classes at the Art Students League in 1938. A gifted student who read Lautréamont, Baudelaire, and Nerval, in 1939 Goldberg finished high school at the age of fourteen and enrolled in City College. He soon found New York’s jazz scene to be a far more compelling environment, and he began skipping classes to frequent the Harlem jazz clubs near campus. Goldberg’s love of jazz would become a lifelong passion and a key component to his approach to composition in his paintings. From 1940 to 1942, like many of the leading artists of the New York School, Goldberg studied with Hans Hofmann. In 1943, he put his pursuit of painting on hold and enlisted in the US Army. Serving in North Africa, Burma, and India, Michael Goldberg received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star before being discharged in 1946. After his service, he traveled and worked in Venezuela before returning to the United States, settling back into New York City, and resuming studies at the Art Students League and Hofmann’s school.

Living downtown and frequenting the Cedar Bar, Michael Goldberg befriended many of the artists of the New York School. In 1951, his work was included in the groundbreaking Ninth Street Show, co-organized by Leo Castelli, Conrad Marca-Relli, and the Eighth Street Club, and featuring the work of—among others—Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. In 1953, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery gave Goldberg his first solo exhibition, but it was not until the late 1950s, when Martha Jackson Gallery began representing him, that his work gained widespread recognition. In 1960, he collaborated with close friend and poet Frank O’Hara on Odes, a book of poems and prints; in 1961, he spent time as a visiting artist at the University of California Berkeley; and in 1962, Mark Rothko gave Michael Goldberg his spacious studio on the Lower Eastside at 222 Bowery, which Goldberg later bought. In 1969, he met artist Lynn Umlauf; they married ten years later, and both began teaching shortly thereafter at the School of Visual Arts. Michael Goldberg remained on staff at SVA until his death.

In the 1980s, he and Umlauf began spending long periods of time in Tuscany, during which Goldberg would frequently drive to Siena and spend part of an afternoon looking at the frescoes and paintings that dominate the city. These excursions were vital to Michael Goldberg, who conceived of painting as a dialogue—with artists who had come before him as well as with contemporary artists and viewers. Like the artist himself, Goldberg’s paintings continue to invite anyone interested to share the boundless passion their creator had for art and conversation.

Michael Goldberg died of a heart attack on December 31, 2007 in Manhattan, amid a resurgent interest in his work.

With international prominence, his work appears in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, Jerusalem; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

His work was recently the subject of a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida (September 21, 2013 - January 5, 2014). Abstraction Over Time: The Paintings of Michael Goldberg, curated by Marcelle Polednik. 

Abstraction Over Time: The Paintings of Michael Goldberg

The exhibition was accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with essays by Marcelle Polednik, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Karen Wilkin and a statement by Irving Sandler.

Michael Goldberg: End to End, The 1950s & 2000s is the second solo exhibition for the artist at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC represents the Estate of Michael Goldberg.

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY

100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY 10011

www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

Beyond the Spectrum: Abstraction in African American Art, 1950-1975 at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Beyond the Spectrum: Abstraction in African American Art, 1950-1975

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

January 11 – March 8, 2014

I think all art is abstract . . . the earliest art of human beings was figurative and abstract. Period. So there was never a time that human beings didn’t deal with both modes. To conceive of something from the world you experience, and then create or recreate based on it, is an abstract process anyway.

- Melvin Edwards

Representation versus abstraction, black versus abstraction: two analogous constructions, each artificial to the core.

- Jonathan Binstock

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Beyond the Spectrum: Abstraction in African American Art, 1950-1975, an exhibition of over thirty paintings and sculptures by leading abstractionists including major works by Charles Alston, Frank Bowling, Ed Clark, Harold Cousins, Beauford Delaney, Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, Norman Lewis, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, and Hale Woodruff. Since its inception, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has consistently exhibited work by African American abstractionists, in solo exhibitions (Thomas, Delaney, Cousins, Lewis) and group shows—on mid-century American abstraction, abstract expressionism, and within its celebrated African American Art: 20thCentury Masterworks series. While many of these artists have been a constant presence in the gallery’s exhibition history, Beyond the Spectrum marks the first time that work by Bowling, Clark, Loving, Pindell, Whitten, and Williams are on view at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

Beyond the Spectrum follows in the curatorial footsteps of Kenkeleba Gallery’s (New York City) groundbreaking 1991 show The Search for Freedom: African American Abstract Painting, 1945-1975 and the more recent Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980 (2006) at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Like these predecessors, Beyond the Spectrum is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of twentieth century African American abstractionists. Instead, the show presents abstract painting and sculpture by a group of American artists working in the years just before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement. While their identity as black Americans is not the motivation for their inclusion in the show, this identity is nonetheless significant in that many found themselves marginalized in a white-dominated art world that granted limited admission to black artists and again within the Black Arts movement, which rested on a revolutionary ethos that saw abstraction as a site of established privilege, limited in its ability to express political dissent and contribute to the struggle for racial equality.

As the title suggests, Beyond the Spectrum plays on notions of spectra—of ranges and degrees between fixed polarities. Just as refraction reveals light to be far more complex than our immediate perception allows, the artists in this show reveal a plethora of positions and possibilities within the seemingly unified categories of “painting,” “sculpture,” “abstraction,” and “political/apolitical art”. In paintings by Alma Thomas and William T. Williams, the color spectrum is mined for its aesthetic and expressive potential as vivid hues are juxtaposed in dynamic compositions that pulse with energy. Working with a more limited palette, Howardena Pindell and Beauford Delaney explored the wide range of shades and intensities within a given color in their luminous paintings. Moving between media, the draped canvases of Sam Gilliam and the torn paintings of Al Loving exist on the spectrum between painting and sculpture. Finally, within the varied strands that make up abstraction, Richard Hunt, Harold Cousins and Melvin Edwards embraced welded metal to explore abstraction in the third dimension.

The works in Beyond the Spectrum attest to the array of approaches and styles within American abstraction, and they challenge two persistent tendencies: to conceive of abstraction as the purview of white artists and to limit notions of authenticity to figural representations of African American culture where black artists are concerned. The first hides the monumental contributions African and African American culture have made to modernism. As American art historian Thomas McEvilley has written, it was not by accident that abstract expressionism emerged in tandem with bebop. Furthermore, to routinely omit artists such as Norman Lewis, who participated in the famous closed-door Studio 35 sessions defining abstract expressionism, is to disregard abstraction’s debt not only to black culture, but to the artists who shaped its contours and analyzed its place in art history and theory.

The second issue, concerning “authenticity” and “the black experience” is generally discussed in relation to the Black Arts movement and its preference for images that contested the pervasive vilification, ridicule, and disparagement of African Americans in US popular culture. But the split that imagined “African American artist” as incompatible with “abstract artist” predates the Black Arts movement by decades. As abstraction gained momentum after the war, black American artists were at the forefront of aesthetic debates, but unlike their white counterparts, they also had to contend with an art world that saw them first as black and second as artists. In his 1946 essay “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” Romare Bearden criticized the tendency to evaluate work by black artists based on “sociological rather than aesthetic” criteria. Although Romare Bearden himself worked in a more representational vein, he was acutely aware that as long as the sociological dominated the conversation, the formal innovations of both figural and abstract artists of color would continue to be dismissed.

Beyond the Spectrum highlights precisely these formal innovations. Emphasizing the stylistic accomplishments of artists whose careers were diminished or who were marginalized or excluded solely on the basis of racial categorization, the exhibition argues that not only did black artists shape American modernism in a vital way, but also that, like the division between figuration and abstraction, the notion that abstract art cannot be either “black” or political is entirely false. 

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY

100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY, 10011

www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

American Abstraction, 1930-1945, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

American Abstraction, 1930-1945

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

November 2, 2013 - January 4, 2014

Comprised of works by twenty-one artists including Burgoyne Diller, Charles Shaw, Louis Stone, Theodore Roszak, Irene Rice Pereira, Albert E. Gallatin, Raymond Johnson, Agnes Pelton, and John Ferren, American Abstraction, 1930-1945 centers on one of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s foundational areas of expertise, early American abstraction. Although the gallery has mounted one-person exhibitions (often with full color catalogues) for many of the artists, this exhibition is the first group show of its kind in nearly a decade. It is also the second time the gallery has brought the work of the largely New-York-based AAA into dialogue with their Southwest contemporaries, the TPG.

In 1936, a group of artists that included Josef Albers, Burgoyne Diller, Werner Drewes, Carl Holty, Ibram Lassaw, and Charles Shaw founded the American Abstract Artists as an “organization of all artists in this country who have produced work which is sufficiently in character with [a] liberal conception of the word ‘abstract.’” At a time when abstraction remained on the fringes of the art world, the group aimed to “foster public appreciation of [abstract] painting and sculpture,” and grant “each artist an opportunity for developing his own work by becoming familiar with the efforts of others.” To accomplish these goals, the AAA collected dues of four dollars a year and organized annual exhibitions as well as studio visits with artists and group discussions and debates on the meaning of abstraction in art.

In 1938, several abstract painters living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico formed a group dedicated to promoting non-objective art in a nation that—even two years after the founding of the AAA—remained skeptical about the merits of abstraction. Known collectively as the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), these artists—whose ranks included Emil Bisttram, Raymond Jonson, Florence Miller Pierce, and Stuart Walker—strove to find a greater meaning in art and life. The group chose “transcendental” for their name because they believed it implied a manner of expression that existed outside of nature, acknowledged intuition, and invoked that which eluded direct representation. Seeing a kindred spirit and guide in Agnes Pelton, the TPG named her their honorary president. Pelton did not attend their meetings, but she did correspond and exhibit with them regularly.

Artists in both groups strove to place abstraction at the center of modern art, and both grew out of the needs of individuals who had been working with abstract art long before either group was established. While both groups valued abstract painting as a “purer” form of art, there were also significant differences between them. The AAA was a large, national organization organized around a generous interpretation of “abstract art,” and it encouraged members to join smaller artist groups oriented around more specific sets of concerns. It became a long-lasting institution, and later members included artists as diverse as Jackson Pollock, Alfonso Ossorio, Claire Falkenstein, and Louise Bourgeois. By contrast, the TPG was more local, geographically and artistically, and shorter lived. Like von Wiegand, TPG members were interested in Theosophy and drew inspiration from Buddhism, and like many abstract artists, they were influenced by neoplasticism as well as Wassily Kandisnky’s theories on color and the spiritual. But the TPG artists also followed Jay Hambridge’s theory of dynamic symmetry, which claimed that artistic perfection could be achieved through mathematical principles based on the symmetry of human and plant forms. Whereas abstract artists often reveled in the material properties of a given medium, TPG artists sought “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light, and design.” At a time when a sense of urgency and crisis prevailed in art from the United States and Europe, the TPG unearthed a language that spoke of the spirit and soul, emphasizing hope and affirming vitality. Fittingly, their logo (designed by Emil and Mayrion Bisttram) took the form of a butterfly, suggesting metamorphosis, flight, and renewal.

The TPG as a formal organization was short-lived but its accomplishments were enduring. Like the AAA, the group organized lectures, published articles, and mounted exhibitions. TPG artists gained notoriety with their participation in several landmark exhibitions, including the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco (1939), the New York World’s Fair (1939), and a 1940 group exhibition at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) in New York City. The group dispersed in 1941, and the AAA continues to promote abstract art to this day.

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY

100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY, 10011

www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

Benny Andrews @ Michael Rosenfeld, New York - There Must Be A Heaven

Benny Andrews: There Must Be A Heaven
Michael Rosenfeld, New York
March 19 - May 18, 2013

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Benny Andrews: There Must Be A Heaven, an exhibition of thirty-six works that span from 1964 to 2005. It is the first comprehensive survey since Andrews’s death in 2006 and the first solo exhibition of his work at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which recently moved to 100 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims and a foreword by Congressman John Lewis, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives (Georgia).

A self-described “people’s painter,” Benny Andrews (American, 1930-2006) was born in Plainview, Georgia, to a family of sharecroppers. In 1948, he received a small scholarship to attend college, but eventually had to drop out. He joined the US Air Force in 1950, served for the duration of the Korean War, and received an honorable discharge in 1954. With funding from the GI Bill, Andrews returned to school, enrolling in the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1958, he received his degree and left Chicago for New York City.

Settling in a tenement on the Lower East Side, he developed the “rough collage” technique that became a hallmark of his style. As Sims in her catalogues essay explains, “Andrews’s use of collage came out of that fact that he found oil painting ‘too academic’ and imbued with more ‘sophisticated’ associations. He found the textural quality of collage appealing, and he used it to ‘keep himself off balance.’ . . . Andrews’s work, with its calculated awkwardness, unconventional techniques, and Southern focus, exists provocatively alongside that of self-taught artists. But as art historian and Andrews scholar J. Richard Gruber would caution us, despite Andrews’s predilection for ‘realistic subject matter, he was intrigued by the fundamental issues associated with abstract art.’ While he was often in conflict with his instructors and peers over the emphasis on abstract expressionism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago . . . he would come to be ‘increasingly more convinced that all art was fundamentally abstract.’”

By the 1960s, Benny Andrews had mastered this technique and exhibition opportunities followed. In 1965, with funding from a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, Andrews traveled to Georgia and began working on his Autobiographical Series. He continued to paint, exhibit, travel, write, and teach until his death from cancer at age 76. During his lifetime, he lectured extensively and received numerous fellowships, grants, and other awards from prestigious international institutions. His work is featured in over thirty permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, High Museum (Atlanta, Georgia), Art Institute of Chicago, Studio Museum of Harlem, and Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC).

Benny Andrews did not see art as a substitute for action. In 1968, he began teaching at Queens College, CUNY, where he was part of the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program designed to help students from underserved areas prepare for college. In 1969, he was a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which advocated for greater representation of black artists, curators, and intellectuals within major museums. In 1971, the art classes he had been teaching at the Manhattan Detention Complex became the cornerstone of a nation-wide prison art program. From 1982 to 1984, he directed the NEA’s Visual Arts Program, and shortly before his death in 2006, Andrews was working on an art project in the Gulf Coast with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina. In 2002, he and his wife, sculptor Nene Humphrey, established the Benny Andrews Foundation to help emerging artists gain greater recognition and to encourage artists to donate their work to historically black museums. In 2008, The Foundation donated over 300 of Andrews’s artworks to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to be distributed to appropriate cultural and educational institutions that will use the artworks as a foundation for education initiatives.

In 2008, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery became the representative of the estate of Benny Andrews, but the gallery has been exhibiting his work regularly since 1994. Most recently, Andrews was part of the 2012 exhibition Benny Andrews, Bob Thompson, Alice Neel, which brought together three New York friends, who steadily pursued figural expressionism in a creative landscape dominated by abstraction and minimalism.

Lowery Stokes Sims, author of “Benny Andrews: From Earth to Heaven and Back,” is the Charles Bronfman International Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design. She was on the education and curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1972-1999 before serving as executive director, president, and adjunct curator for the permanent collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2000-2007). A specialist in modern and contemporary art, Sims is known for her expertise in the work of African, Latino, Native, and Asian American artists. She has lectured and guest curated exhibitions nationally and internationally and was a visiting professor at Queens College and Hunter College in New York City, a fellow at the Clark Art Institute, and a visiting scholar in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota in 2007. She has also served on the selection jury for the World Trade Center memorial and is on the boards of ArtTable, Inc., the Tiffany Foundation, and Art Matters, Inc.

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY
100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY 10011
www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

Morris Graves – Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC

Morris Graves: Falcon of the Inner Eye,  A Centennial Celebration
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York Through October 30, 2010

I paint to rest from the external world—to pronounce it—and to make notations of its essences with which to verify the inner eye -- MORRIS GRAVES (1)

A retrospective exhibition marking the centennial of Morris Graves’s birthday is on view through October 30 at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in NYC. This second solo exhibition featuring the work of Morris Graves (American, 1910-2001) at this gallery examines a career that spanned five decades. Approximately thirty works, including three sculptures from his rarely exhibited Instruments for a New Navigation series, is on view.

Graves lived a life of personal exploration in harmony with nature, and he is known for quiet, haunting images on paper that immortalize the essence of the creatures that inspired him. Empathetic to such subjects as a plover flying through the mist, a snake holding its prey in the moonlight, surf birds cradled in the sea, or a raccoon safely curled up in hibernation for the winter, Graves revealed the mysteries of nature as if he himself were the subject. This communion with the natural world and its eloquent expression through gouache and watercolor was further inspired and influenced by Buddhism, particularly Zen, as well as the arts of East Asia and India.

BIOGRAPHY - MORRIS GRAVES was born the sixth of eight children in 1910 in Fox Valley, Oregon but raised in Seattle. Graves was stricken with pneumonia as a child and spent hours in the family garden, where his love of and keen eye for nature developed. In 1928, he dropped out of high school and became a merchant sailor, traveling to China and Japan and was struck with an instant affinity for East Asian culture. Upon his return to the United States, Graves traveled extensively before settling with relatives in Beaumont, Texas, where he finished high school; eventually, he settled in Seattle.

As an artist, Graves was largely self-taught, but what he lacked in formal art training, he made up for with considerable talent. In 1936, he began painting for the Federal Art Project, and that same year, Graves had his first solo exhibition, at the Seattle Art Museum. In 1940, he participated in two group shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York: 35 under 35 and Mystery and Sentiment. But 1942 became his breakthrough year when Marian Willard Johnson gave him a solo show at the Willard Gallery, and Dorothy Miller included his work in MoMA’s Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States. Afterwards, MoMA director Alfred Barr purchased eleven works by Graves for the museum, an unprecedented acquisition. Duncan Philips also acquired several works for the Philips Collection in Washington, DC. That same year, Graves was drafted into the US Army even though he had applied for conscientious objector status. Graves was inducted into the army against his will, and when he tried to leave the post, he was arrested by military police. Graves spent nearly a year in military prisons, but was finally released in 1943.

Dominated by images of birds usually surrounded by an abstract circle of color and forms, Graves’s work is strikingly silent, commanding the viewer’s intense focus. It is also deeply symbolic; birds, snakes, moons, flowers all speak to the artist’s love of nature, his interest in the transcendental, and his quest for an art that would “guide our journey from partial consciousness to full consciousness.”(2) For Graves, the mechanical cacophony of industry and technology was a major obstacle to this journey. As part of his quest to escape the pollution of modernity, Graves moved to Ireland in 1954, the same year that Life magazine featured an article on Graves, his friend and mentor Mark Tobey, and their fellow Pacific Northwest artists Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan. For the next decade, Graves continued to travel and exhibit extensively, in group and solo shows, and in 1964, he settled in Humboldt County, California.

As the monumental scale of abstract expressionism and the irony of pop art came to dominate US modernism, Graves’s quiet, meditative work declined in popularity. However, his paintings retained a strong international following throughout his life. In 1957, he became the first US artist to receive the Windsor Award, given by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and in 1962, he visited India at the invitation of Indira Gandhi and met her father, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1983, the Philips Collection mounted a major retrospective, Vision of the Inner Eye, which traveled to the Greenville County Art Museum, South Carolina; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Oakland Museum of Art, California; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; and the San Diego Art Museum, California. In 1996, the Humboldt Arts Council named their new museum after Graves, who donated over 100 works, and after his death in 2001, his house became home of the Morris Graves Foundation, a retreat for artists.

Fully illustrated, 104 page exhibition catalogue with 36 color plates, and featuring essays by Peter Selz and Jessica Scarlata along with rare photographs from the Willard Gallery archives. Hardcover. $45.00. Available at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

(1) Quoted in Ray Kass, Morris Graves: Vision of the Inner Eye exhibition catalogue, New York: George Braziller, Inc in association with the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 1983.

(2) “Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Morris Cole Graves,” Humboldt Arts Council/Morris Graves Museum of Art, http://www.humboldtarts.org/About/morrisgraves.htm (accessed October 2010).

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC September 8 - October 30, 2010