National Gallery acquires George Morrison painting

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has acquired its first painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison (1919–2000). Writing for The Art Newspaper, Ben Sutton notes that the “vivid and thickly impastoed areas of red, purple, pink, ochre, blue and green [in Untitled (1961)], which Morrison rendered by squeezing paint from tubes directly onto the canvas, are in dialogue with contemporaneous works by Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and other AbEx artists, but also reflect an Indigenous relationship to the landscape. The composition’s tripartite organisation, an NGA press release notes, evokes the elements of sky, land and water in Anishinaabe cosmology.”

The acquisition was announced on January 27, and an NGA representative says plans are underway to put it on public view.