Morris Graves

Known for his delicate, contemplative drawings that uniquely capture the essence of the animals with which he felt a spiritual connection, Morris Graves (1910–2001) lived a life of inward exploration and communion with nature. An important member of the Northwest School of painting alongside his friend Mark Tobey, Graves achieved international renown for his visionary and spiritual works that poetically revel in the mysteries of the natural world. His interest in exploring ecology and humans’ place within it was further inspired by Buddhism, particularly Zen, as well as the traditional arts of East Asia and India.

Graves spent most of his life in rural locales in the Pacific Northwest, an environment that greatly informed his artistic practice. Shortly after his birth, his family moved from Fox Valley, Oregon to the Puget Sound region of Washington. The son of a homesteader, Graves was a sickly child who developed a keen eye for nature by spending time in the family garden while recovering from bouts of pneumonia. In 1928, he dropped out of high school and became a merchant sailor, traveling to China, Japan, and the Philippines, where he felt instant affinity with the cultures of East Asia, especially Japan. Upon his return to the United States, Graves settled in Beaumont, Texas, where he lived with his aunt while he finished high school. After a stint working on the Federal Arts Project and a trip to New York in 1937, where he tried but failed to find a gallerist, he returned to Seattle, living in a house he built himself on an isolated island off the Puget Sound, referred to as “The Rock.”

Graves was largely self-taught, but his lack of formal art training did not limit his considerable talent. In 1933, his work won first prize at the Northwest Annual Exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum—an award that led to the patronage and guidance of Dr. Richard Fuller, the museum’s founding director. In 1936, Graves had his first solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, and that same year, he began painting for the Federal Art Project. In 1940, Graves participated in two group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York: 35 under 35 and Mystery and Sentiment. However, 1942 was a breakthrough year when, after visiting his studio, dealer Marian Willard Johnson and curator Dorothy Miller took a keen interest his art. Johnson gave him a solo show—the first of a total of fourteen dedicated to Graves—at Willard Gallery, and Miller included his work in the Museum of Modern Art’s important showcase of emerging American artists, Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States. MoMA director Alfred Barr purchased eleven works by Graves for the museum—an unprecedented number at the time. Duncan Phillips, who hailed Graves as an “original genius,”[1] also acquired several works for The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.

That same year, Graves was drafted into the US Army; he applied for conscientious objection status on the grounds of pacifism, but it was denied. He spent eleven months in prison before a military psychologist deemed him unfit for service and authorized his release in 1943. He returned home, but shortly thereafter a naval base was built close to his home on the Rock, and he moved closer to Seattle to escape the noise pollution. There he became a part of an influential artistic community that included Tobey, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In 1949, the artist’s work was presented at the XXIV Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; it was also included that year in the landmark traveling exhibition Milestones of American Painting in our Century, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA.

Like Tobey, a close friend and confidant, Graves was deeply influenced by East Asian religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Taoism. But unlike Tobey, his interests also extended to Hinduism, from which Graves drew some of his imagery. Dominated by images of birds usually surrounded by an abstract circle of color and forms, his work is strikingly silent, commanding the viewer’s intense focus. Graves’s work is deeply symbolic; birds, snakes, moons, flowers all speak to the artist’s love of nature, his interest in the transcendental, and his quest for an art that would “guide our journey from partial consciousness to full consciousness.”[2] But this full consciousness was also an internal state, and while Graves painted identifiable animals and plants, his were paintings of internal images, a “vision of the inner eye.”

For Graves, the mechanical cacophony of industry and technology—the airplanes that flew over his cottage, the cars that roared down streets—was a major obstacle to his journey toward spiritual enlightenment. As part of his quest to escape the pollution of modernity, Graves moved to Ireland in 1954. That same year, Life magazine published a feature on him, Tobey, and fellow Pacific Northwest artists Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan. Paradoxically, technology was the inspiration for the body of work that Graves created during the time spent in Ireland; his Instruments for a New Navigation, a series of elegantly totemic sculptures in metal, glass and stone reminiscent of celestial bodies and telescopes, were executed during the early days of the space program. Ireland proved significant for Graves’s artistic evolution; the New Navigation series represented his only foray into three dimensions and related as much to exploring outer space as it did to his continuing interest in the spirituality of inner space. Graves continued to travel and exhibit extensively in group and solo shows throughout the decade. In 1964, he returned to the United States and settled in Humboldt County, California.

As the monumental scale of abstract expressionism and the irony of pop art came to dominate American modernism, Graves’s audience shifted internationally. In 1957, he became the first US artist to receive the Windsor Award, bestowed by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; in 1962, he visited India at the invitation of Indira Gandhi and met her father, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1983, The Phillips Collection mounted a major retrospective, Vision of the Inner Eye, which traveled to the Greenville County Art Museum, Greenville, SC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and the San Diego Art Museum, San Diego, CA. A solo exhibition focused on Graves’s early works, Morris Graves: The Early Works 1932-1938, took place in 1998 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, WA; Greenville County Museum of Art; and the Art Museum of South East Texas, Beaumont, TX. In 2000, the Humboldt Arts Council named their new museum after Graves, who had donated over 100 of his works to the organization. After his death in 2001, his house, referred to as “the Lake,” became home of the Morris Graves Foundation, a non-profit retreat for artists.

In 2010, a solo survey dedicated to Graves on the occasion of his centennial was shown at the Morris Graves Museum of Art (Humboldt Arts Council), Eureka, CA; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery mounted a concurrent exhibition, Morris Graves: Falcon of the Inner Eye: A Centennial Celebration. In 2013, Graves’s letters were published in a book, Morris Graves: Selected Letters, edited by Vicki Halper and Lawrence Fong and published by the University of Washington Press. That same year, his archives were made available to the public at the Knight Library in Eugene, OR. In 2016, Morris Graves: The Nature of Things opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. In June 2021, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon opened Morris Graves: On the Surface, a solo exhibition primarily drawn from their extensive holdings of Graves’ work. In August 2021, Bird of the Inner Eye, a chamber opera based on the artist’s letters and archives written by composer Gina Leishman and librettist Joan Schirle was presented by Dell’Arte International at The Arcata Playhouse in Arcata, CA.

In the last two decades, work by Graves has been consistently featured in a number group exhibitions, most notably Klange des Inneren Auges: John Cage, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves (Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves) at the Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany and the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art, Tacoma, WA (2002); Immeasurable Spaces, Incalculable Energies: Tobey, Graves, Callahan, Anderson at the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA (2003); The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2009); John Cage with Morris Graves and Mark Tobey at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2012); and Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical at the Seattle Art Museum (2014). Most recently, Graves’s work was on view in the exhibitions Peindre la nuit (Painting the Night) at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France (2018) and continuum… at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA (2019).

Major institutions with work by Graves in their permanent collections include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Crystal Bridges Museum of Modern Art, Bentonville, AK; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Des Moines Art Center, IA; Detroit Institute of Arts (MI); Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, The University of Oregon, Eugene; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Sheldon Museum of Art at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Tate Modern, London; Wadsworth Atheneum, Greensboro, NC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has represented the Morris Graves Foundation since 2012.

[1] Duncan Phillips as quoted in Ray Kass, Morris Graves: Vision of the Inner Eye (New York: George Braziller, 1983), 32

[2] Graves, Guggenheim Fellowship Application, 1945, as cited in Kass, 50 and as quoted in Selz