Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Morris Graves
American; 20th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)
82%
Bird Sensing the Essential Insanities. 1944. Tempera on paper mounted on composition board
The title is overblown, of course, but the difference between Bird Sensing the Essential Insanities and some of Graves's less-good philosophizing work is that this piece's symbolism doesn't ever exhaust itself, and is in fact complexified rather than explained away and liquidated by its title. Namely, it's difficult by means of visual experience alone to put together how this pensive bird is supposed to be relating to the bands of red and fields of gray that surround it; it takes the oddly specific, oddly ambivalent framing device of the title to suggest how the space in this image might be working, but then you're left with questions like: Are the red bands the "insanities," or are they expressions of the bird's sensing activity? Is the titular bird actually the small one at bottom left, and the more mythical-looking avian at center is some vision it's having? Is that jagged gray form a vessel or a stone or a pit or a pond? Does the wedge of black at upper left exist in the same world as the tableau in the foreground, or is there a medley of cosmic stuff at play here? In a word, there's an exciting contradiction between the almost overdetermined signifying specificity of the sensing bird emblem and the ambiguous spatial order it's set within. On an art historical note, it bears mentioning that the "mask" the bird is wearing is obviously an obvious allusion to the "formline" technique, suggesting Graves's interest in the Native arts of America's Northwest Coast. (TFS, 2026)
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)
78%
Moor Swan. 1933. Oil on canvas
Already at this early stage, Graves was toeing a few lines: those separating cosmic significance from a sentimentality for symbols; experimentation from petty daubing; well-wielded emptiness from a lack of finish; and a productively limited from a simply limiting narrowness of palette. This painting manages to stay on the artistically gainful side of these divides, but it only ever does so by a hair's-breadth. Its main dynamic is the coexistence within it of (and frequent interaction between) three separate pictorial layers: untreated canvas, thinly applied paint, and thickly applied paint. The distinctness of each of these layers gives the work an appearance of being rent apart, yet this disunified quality is sufficiently present across the whole of the painting's surface as to provide for it a paradoxical sense of pictorial unity. When tensions between the three layers come to a head — as they do on the swan's back, where raw ground, sparse blacks, and glistening thick impasto feathers are all crammed tightly together — the power of Graves's technique is apparent, but elsewhere, as in the planes of blending pigment above the bird, their relations are a bit too untroubled and therefore inartistic. The swan threatens at first glance to be too neatly a symbol of something, but then its ambivalent relationship with Grave's complicated handling of paint — look how its left flipper sticks out into that band of plain canvas — saves it. (TFS, 2026)
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)
78%
Still Life with Onions. c1937. Oil on canvas
There's a bit of Hartley in here, and a bit of Matisse, but this painting isn't reducible to either one of their styles, and that's very good for it. There's a funny perspective thing going on (this is the Matisse) such that the tabletop which the produce is set upon seems to be parallel to the picture plane, while the close-by ground and the far-off landscape at each one of the four corners of the canvas both appear to be receding into depth. In a more classically modernist composition like this (as opposed to one of his more expressive, less taut, more symbolical pictures), Graves can seem at times to struggle to make his individual forms interact with the overall (Matissean) pictorial order. But then the handling is absolutely stunning, not just at the level of all the individual brushstrokes that make the tabletop seem turbid and alive, but also the marks that rim each form (and this is the Hartley). Too, the color is phenomenal: the peach in the main plane and the browns and grays around it are given life by these erratic strands of red and yellow and green at their edges. If this painting doesn't suggest that Graves had developed a style, it does demonstrate that he had cultivated his talents. (TFS, 2026)
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)
52%
Spring with Machine Age Noise No. 3. 1957. Ink and transparent and opaque watercolor
This strikes you at first as a bad painting — the sort of thing done by a dilettante in the afterglow of New York abstraction — and it never gets over that initial badness. But some patience and a willingness to take it on its own terms reveals it to be at least an interesting work of art, if not quite a good one. Its title tells you how to look at it: synesthetically, as a portrait of a natural soundscape corrupted by "machine age noise." If this doesn't exactly justify the lack of substance in the picture's pretty watercolored foreground, or the dissonant relationship between this and the overbearing abstraction in the sky above, it at least explains these faults and grounds them in something better than misapprehension or mannerism. Still, it's not enough that Graves had an interesting idea for why to paint this painting; what counts is that it failed to come through as an elaborated visual language. (TFS, 2026)
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest)
...%
Each Time You Carry Me This Way. 1953. Ink and charcoal on green-toned paper, now faded to brown, mounted on heavyweight paper and fiberboard
Sometimes Graves's symbols pull themselves apart from whatever it is it seems he wanted them to symbolize; other times they don't. When they do, the pictures can be good; when they don't; Graves's art struggles. This drawing is one of those where the image just screams armchair philosophy and half-baked metaphorizing, which is to say it's a bad Graves. In part this is because of its title, in part it's because the bird seems an "illustration" and the landscape elements surrounding it are too cleanly abstracted to serve as a countering force to its clarity, in part it's because there's nothing to challenge the slick facility with which Graves has handled his charcoal and ink. The problem isn't that Graves ought not to have striven towards meaning, but rather that meaning here goes on at the expense of pictorial integrity, which is a different sort of significance than the one Graves was consciously after. And so it's all too readily graspable. (TFS, 2026)