The Creative Arena in Which the Artist Works and Invites the Viewer to Take a More Careful Look That Will Lead to a Fuller Appreciation of Graves's Art
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THE CREAT1 The four wor s s own om the series inter's Leaves ta e us from the genesis oft e image to its more re ized form in the finished painting. The changes in emphasis, position, and color that become apparent through these comparisons enhance our understanding of the finished piece. When the study Endless Knot Design is paired with the painting Bird with Rose-Colored Plumage, we are surprised that the knot that had been so dominant in the study has become subservient to the bird image in the more developed work, and we can admire the way Graves has interwoven these two disparate images. When we see how Graves struggled over the gesture of the mouse in the study for Mouse Helping a Hedgerow Animal Carry a Prie-Dieu, we appreciate its graceful resolution in the finished wash drawing. Other works in this exhibition make us aware of the artistic means Graves uses to achieve certain effects. In Bird Singing, we see the artist's intriguing technique of first painting on the reverse of the paper to create the desired texture on the front. We learn that Dying Bird and Bird Preening Breast, at first considered related but quite discrete paintings, are actually mirror images of one another, since it is now clear that Bird Preening Breast was used as an absorbant sheet to draw moisture from the principal image, Dying Bird. This exhibition thus offers a glimpse of the creative arena in which the artist works and invites the viewer to take a more careful look that will lead to a fuller appreciation of Graves's art. The Winter's Leaves, 1944, tempera on paper, 27-5/8 x 58-1/4. Anonymous donor. 68:5.1. THE CREATIVE ARENA: STUDIES BY MORRIS GRAVES DURING HIS MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS of FROM THE COLLECTION of consciousness. This is suggested painting, Morris Graves has remained metaphorically in Effort to Bloom, where on the periphery of the recognized art movements, a keen the plant stem that emerges from the vase carries with it a bud observer of the events of his time but unequivocally committed moving along a serpentine path in the progression from seed to to a vision removed from the fashions of the day. Graves often flower. has been placed with a group of artists, including Mark Tobey, In the work of the late 1930s Graves pursued an imagery that Guy Anderson, and Kenneth Callahan, loosely identified as the could at times be described as surreal because of his creation of Northwest School of Visionary Art. Much as his painting is a dreamlike atmosphere that often contains unusual combina imbued with the landscape, the flora, and fauna of the Pacific tions of objects and symbols. This is true of Bird of Paradise on Northwest, his work ex Revolving Door, in which tends well beyond the par a precisely rendered bird ticular characteristics of with exotic plumage sings one region. Through his forlornly on a revolving intense involvement with door ina barren landscape. Asian art and philosophy, In his correspondence Graves has arrived at an Graves has described the imagery that is not wholly revolving door as the only Western and not wholly perch in a confusing desert Asian, but is a distinct style environment ("Globe all his own. Earth in the solar system"), Graves was born August in which there is no "in" 10, 1910, on the family or "out," in which the homestead in eastern Or "center is everywhere and egon. Most of his youth the perimeter nowhere." and adolescence was spent When Graves met Mark in the Seattle area. Even Tobey in 1938, he en as a young boy, he showed countered another artist a remarkable affinity for who shared his affinity for the wildflowers and ani Eastern aesthetics. mals of the region, and at Tobey's method of"white Winter Leaves, 1948, ink and brush on paper, 17 x 23. 68:6.99. an early age he could iden writing," inspired origi tify a great many varieties of wildflowers. A formative trip to the nally by Oriental calligraphy, was particularly attractive to Orient on a merchant ship in 1928 when Graves was seventeen Graves and he began to envelop his central images in a fine initiated a life-long fascination with the East. webbing of white lines. In Fantastic Table with Double Serpent, Although much intrigued by Asian art, Graves's early work was white writing is used selectively around the central images. In more influenced by the style of such European painters as Van the tempera paintil)g In the Moonlight, the calligraphic white Gogh, Soutine, and Bonnard, whose paintings he had seen in lines have become much more pervasive. They allude not only reproduction. This European inheritance is apparent in an early to actual moonlight but to spiritual illumination. oil painting, Crucifixion, one of several works in this exhibition Images from the natural world, and particularly birds, recur that draws on Christian iconography. The Christian symbol of throughout Graves's work and are treated with an empathy that the chalice figures in the Purification Series, where Graves uses reflects his effort to communicate through art a sense of unity the pagan sacrificial calf interwoven with the image of fire to with nature. Graves's birds go beyond a mimetic naturalism and signify spiritual transmutation. In spite of the stylistic resem often become personifications of inner states. In Crane with Void, blance to Western art of his early work, Graves's attitude the crane is treated in such a way that it appears almost towards painting was much more attuned to the art of Asia, diaphanous in relation to the background, whereas the para which he felt eschewed self-expression. He sought the meta doxically solid-looking void is an opaque, gray circle on top of physical in the act of creation and came to regard painting as a the crane's head. The void in Buddhist philosophy represents form of meditation that called on the viewer's own contempla the most enlightened state that can be achieved. In the study for tive participation to achieve a shared experience of a more this painting, the crane leans down in a much more animated spiritual nature. gesture, one leg lifted, still balancing the void on its head. The emphasis on metamorphosis evident in the Purification Graves first achieved significant public recognition in 1942 Series is a central element in much of Graves's work. In Table of when thirty of his paintings were shown at the Museum of Sorrow, the table top becomes a miniature landscape, one leg Modem Art in the large exhibition entitled Americans 194 2: 18 that of a bird and the other a classical pillar. Often the transfor Artists from 9 States. But shortly after the success of national mation that takes place signifies a movement into higher levels acclaim, Graves, a conscientious objector, was confined at an army camp for six months for refusing military service. In Winter's Leaves, a group of somber works that grew out of this painful experience, Graves paints windblown dry leaves to symbol ize the lives lost in war. Other images of despair emerged during the war years. In Dying Bird, the ibis feeding on its own breast reflects Graves's response to the atomic bombing in 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The chalice, which had first appeared in Graves's work in the 1930s, reappears in the Journey se riesof1943. ln both Chalice and]ourney III, the vessel, whose symbolic meaning can be associ ated with the Holy Grail, is set in the midst of a landscape that appears to be made of the same substance as the vessel. The journey referred to in these paintings is a spiritual one, and the consubstantiality of the chalice with its envi rons conveys Graves's mystical belief in the indivisibility of mind and matter. After the war, Graves, who was convinced of the restorative mission of artists, was awarded a Above left: [Crane with Void], ca. 1945, tempera on paper, 20-7/8 x 14-3/4. University of Oregon Museum of Art, Haseltine Collection of Pacific Northwest Art. 75:3.23. Above right: [Sketch for Crane Guggenheim fellowship to travel to Japan. Be with Void], ca. 1945-46, pen and ink on oriental paper, 21-1/4 x 10-1/8. 68:6.237. cause ofU .S. government travel restrictions, he was unable to get any farther than Hawaii. Graves studied lines and little distinction between figure and ground, these Chinese ritual bronzes at the Honolulu Academy of Art and elegant creations are barely visible. Borrowing from the Japa created a group of paintings using the bronzes in combination nese screen paintings he admired, Graves introduced the use of with his own idiosyncratic imagery. In Chinese Bronze in Form of gold in the background of his paintings. The Masked Bird series Pheasant, a luminous, pink lotus rises mysteriously from the that followed shortly thereafter evolved from Graves's interest depths of the bronze. Vessels continue to be a central image in in the Japanese Noh theater, which he encountered during a Graves's work. In the Bouquet series, vessels that in many ways trip to Japan in 1954. The stylized impersonality of the Noh resemble the ritual bronzes often contain a solitary flower actors, who wore masks, was particularly appealing to Graves, representing the single plant that miraculously has survived and he depicted his birds with masked visages. from the many seeds that are sown. Graves had become increasingly disenchanted with the per In the early 1950s, Graves concentrated on a new group of petuation of wartime industry and in 1954 he decided to move paintings called Spirit Birds, which signalled a departure from his to Ireland to escape the noise and technological encroachments more agitated birds of the war years.