Kyle Morris (1918-1979)
Number 5, 1956
Signed lower left: "Kyle Morris"
Dated, titled, inscribed, and signed verso: "1956 NO. 5 / 55 x 48 / Kyle Morris" Oil on canvas
55 x 47 3/4 in (139.7 x 121.3 cm)
Provenance
The artist
Jeff Morris (By descent)
Private collection, NJ (Acquired from above)
Exhibitions
Stable Gallery, New York, Kyle Morris: Paintings, September 24–October 13, 1956.
Exhibition Sticker verso: American Federation of Arts, Flint show based on Brussels Worlds Fair artists, Aug. 7–Sept. 7.
Description
A well-known member of the New York School, Kyle Morris (1918-1979) took a studio in downtown Manhattan in the 1950s after serving in World War II. Shifting away from the
figurative painting of his formal training, Morris began to develop a distinct style of abstraction that would come to define his reputation. After his first major solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 1952, Morris showed regularly at the Stable Gallery and Kootz Gallery, the latter which considered him a core member along with artists Hans Hofmann, Conrad Marca-Relli, and Giorgio Cavallon. In 1961, Morris was included in the Guggenheim’s landmark exhibition, “American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists,” which surveyed the best of contemporary abstract painting in America at that time.
Evocative and poetic, Number 5 was executed in 1956. This work attest to Morris’s deep interest in the metaphysical properties of painting, particularly his attempt to “achieve a visual dialogue between form and void.” Number 5, with its all-over gestural abstraction and tonal variation, speaks to the artist’s investment in “what happens when light and color charge a space with energies that sometimes oscillate... space is not a static void.” Indeed, Morris believed throughout his career that the “ultimate reality” of a painting began and ended with the space of its surface. In The History of Modern Art, H. Harvey Arnason described the development of the work of Morris:
Morris was a figurative painter until the 1950s, working in a romantic mode that gradually became more spare and austere. Later, in the 1950s, he was associated with the younger group of Abstract Expressionists such as Joan Mitchell. In the 1960s, he worked first with large color shapes, sometimes balanced by expressive brushed areas. From this he has moved gradually to a rigidly austere form of monochromatic hard-edged painting, turning shapes around the edges of the stretched canvas.
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Kyle Morris earned a BA and MA from Northwestern University and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he exhibited in “American Painting and Sculpture” at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1953), “Younger American Painters” at the Guggenheim (1954), “61st American Exhibition” at the Art Institute of Chicago (1954), “Nature in Abstraction” at the Whitney Museum (1958), “Art Since 1945” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1964), among numerous others. Morris taught extensively throughout his life, including at Cooper Union, University of California Berkeley, Yale University Graduate School, and the University of Texas Austin. His work is collected in many institutions, such as the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, Albright-Knox Gallery, and the Des Moines Art Center.