George Lovett Kingsland Morris (also George L. K. Morris)

George L. K. Morris was an American painter and sculptor and one of the principal advocates of American abstract art in the 1930s and 1940s. As an activist, critic, and financier, Morris made a lasting impact on the second generation of American abstractionists as well as the collections of public institutions, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Lesser known as a collector, Morris also assembled a small yet notable group of American and European nonfigurative paintings and sculptures.

Morris grew up in Manhattan as part of a distinguished, well-situated family and studied literature and art at Yale University between 1924 and 1928. From an early age, his affluent background afforded him close encounters with European art and culture. In summer 1927, he studied easel and fresco painting at a French art school for American students in Fontainebleau, and in fall 1928 and 1929 he spent two semesters at New York’s Art Students League where he worked under the artist John Sloan. In spring 1929 and 1930, he also attended the Académie Moderne in Paris, where he studied with painters Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.

Morris’s exposure to the Parisian art scene catalyzed his creative life. It was in Paris during summer 1927 that he met fellow American artist and collector A. E. Gallatin, a distant cousin and family friend, as well as other artists who would eventually become his teachers, friends, and collaborators. Beginning in 1929, Morris and Gallatin traveled to the French capital together, continuing to make regular returns in the 1930s. During these sojourns, Gallatin and the painter Jean Hélion introduced Morris to artists working in Paris, including Hans (Jean) Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso as well as Carl Holty, Balcomb and Gertrude Greene, Albert Swinden, and others.

In 1933, Morris became curator of Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art (renamed the Museum of Living Art in 1936) in New York. He also began to acquire works for his personal collection either directly from the artists he had become acquainted with in Paris or through their dealers. Among his earliest purchases were a 1920 watercolor by Braque entitled Standing Woman and a 1928 oil painting by Picasso, Dinard (both Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio, Lenox, Massachusetts), as well as Miró’s 1933 canvas Painting (MoMA). Other acquisitions included a group of three 1911 Cubist works: Braque’s still life Fruit Dish and Glass, Léger’s drawing Cubist Figure (both Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio, Lenox, Massachusetts), and Picasso’s painting The Poet (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice).

Morris’s collection reflected his desire to educate himself about the development of abstract art, beginning with Cubism and moving to pure abstraction. Once installed in his home, the collection also served to instruct visitors, among them many fellow artists. According to a 1986 interview with his wife Suzy Frelinghuysen, who was a painter and an opera singer, Morris assembled the core of his collection before the two were married in 1935. The provenance of several Cubist works in Morris’s holdings provides further nuance to the collection’s beginnings. It shows that Morris had acquired a number of works on the secondary market by the early 1940s. Among them were Juan Gris’s 1914 papier collé Fruit Dish on a Striped Cloth and the artist’s 1918 oil on panel Packet of Cigarettes (both Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio, Lenox, Massachusetts). In 1936 Morris cofounded the American Abstract Artists group, an organization that gave support through exhibitions, publications, and lectures when few such opportunities existed for abstract artists in the United States. Morris also acquired works by members Ilya Bolotowsky, John Ferren, Gallatin,Charles Shaw, Esphyr Slobodkina, and Alice Trumbull Mason.

During this period, Morris actively provided financial support to various exhibition, institutional, and publication projects. In New York, he funded an exhibition of Léger’s work at MoMA in 1936 and served on the museum’s Advisory Committee. In 1936 he and Gallatin jointly acquired Picasso’s Three Musicians (1923; Philadelphia Museum of Art) for the Museum of Living Art. A year later, Morris began to support the leftist publication Partisan Review, serving as chief art critic and editor until 1942. He also co-founded the short-lived English-French journal Plastique with the Arps, Gallatin, and the Dutch artist César Domela-Nieuwenhuis (sometimes Nieuwenhuis Domela). These efforts aligned with Morris’s goal to further the appreciation of American abstract art at a time when figurative painting and Regionalism—a realistic style of painting that rose to popularity during the Great Depression—were favored by North American critics and collectors.

After Morris’s death, his collection remained installed in his house and studio in Lenox, Massachusetts. The Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio has been open to the public during the summer and fall seasons since July 1998.