Exceptional Works: George Morrison

Landscape: Wood Collage, 1980

Found and prepared wood 38 x 80 x 2 1/4 inches
 96.5 x 203.2 x 5.7 cm

George Morrison in his home studio, Saint Paul, Minnesota. 1975. George Morrison Estate/Bockley Gallery

“Paintings in wood—that’s how I see them.”

—George Morrison, 1998

The late American artist George Morrison (Grand Portage Band of Chippewa, 1919–2000) is celebrated for compositions that convey the aesthetic, spiritual, and geographic influences of his birthplace and the fervent creativity of the early period of abstract expressionism.

Landscape: Wood Collage (1980) is a monumental work, part of an important series of large-scale wood collages begun in 1965. These works, recalling the wood assemblage sculptures of his friend and fellow artist Louise Nevelson, expand Morrison’s investigations of space and proportion and gave a new language to his exploration of landscape-informed abstraction.

George Morrison (in focus, bottom right) at a loft party in New York, 1940s. George Morrison Estate/Bockley Gallery

Born and raised on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota, Morrison moved to New York on scholarship in 1943. Studying at the Art Students League, Morrison promptly entered the fold of the dynamic downtown art scene, forging close friendships with artists such as Franz Kline, Louise Nevelson, and Herman Cherry, and becoming acquainted with contemporaries including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Incorporating aspects of cubism and surrealism, Morrison’s abstract expressionist style invokes an intuitive subtlety with colors and textures while demonstrating a deep understanding of the interconnected effects of light and form. He traveled to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1952, where he continued to develop a signature style of abstraction that combined elements of expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.

The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through May 31, 2026.

George Morrison in his studio, Provincetown, 1965. George Morrison Estate/Bockley Gallery

In 1965, Morrison began creating his wood collages or “paintings in wood” from driftwood found while summering in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Gathering driftwood he found there and when combing the nearby beaches on Cape Ann, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket, he began to construct monumental collages, fitting and forming the pieces of wood together to create cubist-inspired relief compositions that are mostly rectangular in form.

The artist juxtaposes natural materials, whose appearance and surface qualities make apparent their history and age, with fragments of commercial-grade wood used for utilitarian objects. Marked by paint, holes, or saw blades, these industrially fabricated pieces of wood appear as weathered as the naturally-occurring driftwood Morrison fits together.

“[The driftwood came from] the South Seas, the Caribbean, the North Atlantic. It all washed up on this tip of Cape Cod. Some had bits of paint, half worn off. Some had rust stains or colors soaked in. Industrial boards were washed nice and gray. Nail holes added texture and color where rusted nails had oxidized the wood. There was an interesting history in those pieces—who had touched them, where they had come from.”

—George Morrison, 1998

George Morrison, Landscape: Wood Collage, 1980 (detail)

The elegant refinement of the present work is typical of Morrison’s later collages, which also reflect the artist’s deep connection to the North Shore of Lake Superior, where he returned to live and work in the latter part of his life. Although he was highly particular about what pieces he collected for his work, they varied widely in form. He also altered and weathered pieces himself. Marked by industrial and elemental forces, many of the components develop a silver, sheen-like patina over time due to the interaction between water, sunlight, and the surface of the wood. The attuned variation in color and texture that characterizes these wood collages speaks to the artist's skill in harnessing the unpredictable beauty of natural forms.

“I make them from scratch, yet they are derived from nature, based on landscape,” he explained. “There’s a horizon line in each one, about a quarter of the way from the top. That’s an absolute straight line, made with a pencil, to help guide the work…. I use the aesthetics of painting to guide my selection of wood for contrast and texture, color and shape. All this is formal, yet the driftwood itself gives a piece of history—wood that has a connection to the earth, yet has come from the water.”

An excerpt from the WDSE-8 documentary George Morrison: Reflections, 1999

“My later collages were fitted together more precisely.... I started to weather wood, too, selecting brand new pieces that had some knots in them or a particular kind of grain. I might sand the edges to look a little worn. Then I put the wood outside for six months or a year. It gradually turned gray and became a usable piece.”

—George Morrison, 1998

George Morrison, New England Landscape, 1965–1967. Detroit Institute of Arts

George Morrison, Collage IX: Landscape, 1974. Minneapolis Institute of Art

 

“Touchstones of modern art, [the collages] symbolize the whole of Morrison’s career, in which memories of specific places are internalized and realized in a visual language based on mastery of the paradigms of the international avant-garde.”

—W. Jackson Rushing III, art historian, 2013

George Morrison at work on a wood collage in his Grand Portage studio. George Morrison Estate/Bockley Gallery

Other wood collages are in prominent public collections including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Art Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

“There is something inside that always comes through. Gradually, the landscape themes crept through into my art. The indirect influences of land, water, and wood.”

—George Morrison, 1987

George Morrison on the deck of his home overlooking Lake Superior, n.d. George Morrison Estate/Bockley Gallery  “I realize now that in making these [collages], I may have been inspired subconsciously by the rock formations of the North Shore.”

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