George Morrison at The Met, Reviewed

Robert McKenzie for The Brooklyn Rail names The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York at The Metropolitan Museum of Art an excellent introduction to the arc of Morrison’s career – a “mini-survey” with a focus on his years in New York City (1943–1960). 

McKenzie offers highlights of what the exhibition and catalog reveal about Morrison’s (1919–2000) biography, from photographs and wall labels on his early and later years at home on the north shore of Lake Superior, to the ephemera that contextualizes his exhibitionary and relational belonging in the New York art world.

Drawing attention to Morrison’s drawings and paintings in chronological order, McKenzie describes figurative works from the 1940s, small to large-scale abstractions of the 1950s, and 1960s paintings that aligned with the New York school of Action painting and Abstract Expressionism. While he notes Morrison’s ties to these movements, as well as Expressionism and Surrealism, he refers to Morrison’s “obsession with place and landscape” as a “psychological connection to geography” implicit in the exhibition and his oeuvre. He writes, “for Morrison, artistic movements were simply part of the toolkit he used while searching for his own, very personal, subject matter. Nature was a key touchstone for him throughout his life, although his work reveals stylistic shifts and turns, as he never truly subscribed to one particular ‘ism.’” McKenzie continues by turning attention to paintings whose titles or qualities infer references to landscape, for example, “White Painting (1965), which at first glance seems to be one of the most non-referential paintings, contains a spinning orb that is a sun or moon, as well as cross-hatched lines like trees interrupting a horizon.”

The exhibition’s curator Patricia Marroquin Norby also included a selection of post-New York period landscape paintings. Known as the Horizon series, these works were guided by Morrison’s view from his home and studio located on his Ojibwe homelands of Grand Portage Indian Reservation on Lake Superior. McKenzie sees these works as a lens through which to better understand his earlier works’ “artistic, personal and spiritual values.” He traces the significance of the lake’s horizon as more than a compositional tool, quoting Morrison: “it became a symbol of the forces of nature meeting the universe, the ‘edge of the world’; of trying to see beyond the ‘unknown….I am fascinated with the ambiguity, the change of the many moods and colors, the sense of sound and movement above and below the line. Therein lies some of the mystery of painting: the transmutation, the choosing and manipulation of pigment that becomes the substance of art.”¹

The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York at The Metropolitan Museum is on view in the American Wing from July 17, 2025 through May 31, 2026.

1. George Morrison, “‘Small Painting Series’ background,” undated, 101.H.4.7B, Box 7, George Morrison Papers. Minnesota Historical Society, https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-finding-aids-public/library/findaids/01435/pdfa/01435-00037.pdf.