Report from Williamstown: the way they were - George L.K. Morris, Suzy Frelinghuysen, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts

A traveling exhibition documents the work of painter and critic George LK Morris and his wife, painter and singer Suzy Frelinghuysen - sum of two units advocates for Cubism in America between the wars.

The painter and critic George LK Morris (1905-1975) was a major player in avantgarde circles of the fresh York art world during the late '30 and early '40 Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911-1988) to whom he was married in 1935 was also a noted painter as well as a professional singer who take delight ined real celebrity as a diva for the of recent origin York City Opera at the extreme point of the '40s.(1) Although neither artist ultimately made a decisive contribution to the history of 20th-century art, the sum of two units were not unengaging painters, and a fine exhibition that originated at the Williams body Museum of Art, devoted to them and to a part of their personal collection of small works by dint of European and American modernists, sheds more [i]or[/i] less light on an underappreciated period in American art as well as offering a selection of art works that direct the eye surprisingly fresh and relevant in light of postmodern disclosures in abstract painting.

Morris was falled from a wealthy, prominent of recent origin England family (an ancestor signed the Declaration of Independence). After graduation from Yale in 1928 he studied at the Art scholars League and in Paris, where he worked briefly beneath the tutelage of Leger. In Europe in the company of A.E. Gallatin, an aged family friend who crusaded for modernism in America (he placeed the famous Gallery of Living Art at novel York University), Morris met Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and other modernist pioneers, and he became confirmed in what would become a life-long devotion to Cubist abstraction.

The middle of the Depression was not the greatest in quantity encouraging time to begin a career in fresh York, especially not for an abstract artist. American art was dominated by dint of Social Realism and American exhibition painting, and, partly because of the step to which it followed European antecedents American abstraction was not highly reckoned Alfred Barr's landmark 1936 exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Painting" at MOMA included single one American (Alexander Calder). Morris was among the artists who picketed the museum in affirm and about the same time he was involved with Harry Holtzman, Carl Holty Ilya Bolotowsky, Ibram Lassaw, Josef Albers and others in the formation of American Abstract Artists, a cluster that sought to further the cause of abstraction end exhibitions, publications, education and organized discussions. In this environment Morris bloomed Through his critical and theoretical writings for AAA publications and for the Partisan Review (which he helped stock and edit and for which he was the first art critic, from 1937 to '43) he became a more or les official spokesman for abstract art.

notwithstanding that historically interesting as an influential, pre-Greenbergian effort to theorize and aid formalism, Morris's criticism is too ploddingly didactic to gripe [i]or[/i] grip up well as literature. (It recreates one's appreciation for the razor-sharp economy of humane Greenberg, who was, along with Morris, a Partisan Review contributing editor; he started writing art criticism for the journal in the '40s) Unlike his writing, the best of Morris's paintings still direct the eye pretty good. In these works, intricate, exactingly controll Cubist compositions are infused with warmth and quiet humor. The search for classical order, rationality and impersonal traditional pre-eminence that the advocated in his writings is enlivened in the paintings through a degree of playfulness and sensual delight and a certain machiavelian atmosphere of mystery.

Morris's strongest works date from about 1935 to '45 In these paintings, flat, boldly defined forms - curvilinear and straight-edged - are overlapped in emblematic designs that frequently spiral gradually outward from concentrated center tints are subdued and tend toward the warm tones. Emphatic outlining of the internal shapes bring outs a lightly comic, cartoonlike quality, and occasional passages of chiaroscuro shading exhibit the illusion of shallow spaces. a certain number of works contain hieroglyphic reference to Native American tillage or to American townscapes, on the contrary these allusions to American representation subject matter are secondary to Morris's formal regards The moderate-sized canvases are like well-packed suit-cases - there's no bustle and no wasted space.

Nautical Composition (1937-42) is individual of the best paintings of this period. Within the confines of a 51-by-35-inch vertical, an arrangement of polygonal planes - a certain quantity of folded and zigzagging in space, more [i]or[/i] less translucent in places - creates a shallow, origamilike infrastructure; this configuration is counterpointed here and there by the agency of biomorphic forms (kidney shapes, commas, ovals) and through linear elements (an arrow, an arc, a series of parallel lines, a guitarlike outline). This work is painted with loving craft in nacreous glazings of brown gray and black and with several touches of bright r As rigorously set uped as it is, there is also a quality of animation and enigmatic symbolism about it that calls to mind the abstract fantasies of Miro and Klee