The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York Opens at the Met
The much anticipated solo exhibition by George Morrison at The Metropolitan Museum of Art focuses on artworks and archival materials from the time of the artist’s arrival to the city in 1943 to attend the Art Students League, to his role within the city’s Abstract Expressionist scene in the 1950s and 60s.
The exhibition places major works such as Structural Landscape (Highway) (1952) and Untitled (Blue Painting) (1958) in conversation with archival materials including exhibition announcements and photographs that attest to Morrison’s key involvement in the development of Abstract Expressionism alongside figures such as his friends and colleagues, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Louise Nevelson. These materials amplify his enmeshment in the artistic and social milieu of Greenwich Village. He attended classes taught by George Grosz and Morris Kantor, socialized with fellow art students at local bars, and attended jazz shows at nightclubs. “N.Y. really gets to you somehow,” Morrison wrote in a letter to fellow Minnesotan artist Frances Cranmer Greenman. “…I want to stay a good while before I get out of here.”
The selection of works reveals how, over time, Morrison combined inspirations, including Surrealist practices, the primacy of markmaking, and impressions of his rural homelands of northern Minnesota and the urban environment of New York. His figurative works as a student developed into abstract compositions that by turns can evoke bridges and telephone lines, or the shores of Lake Superior. In her exhibition essay, curator Patricia Marroquin Norby draws attention to how Morrison’s lived experience of Indigeneity also influenced his practice: “Ojibwemowin–the richly visual Ojibwe language, which he had regularly heard and spoke as a very young child–provided him with an understanding of colors and the natural world as alive.”
Other featured works include Construction in Fantasy (1953), Aureate Vertical (1958), and White Painting (1965). The exhibition concludes with selections from Morrison’s Horizon series, which he painted later in life after having returned to Minnesota with his then-wife and fellow artist, Hazel Belvo.
A full issue of The Met’s Bulletin is dedicated to the exhibition with contributions by Patricia Marroquin Norby, Hazel Belvo, Brenda J. Child, and Laura Wertheim Joseph, and is available here. Learn more about The Magical City from MPR News, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.