Adrian Morris; Painter (TERRIFIC)
Hyfler/Rosner
Painstaking painter who exhibited rarely
(As a result, I can't find any of his works on the web.)
17 December 2004
Adrian Grant Morris, painter and teacher: born London 18 May
1929; married 1956 Penelope Dendy (one son; marriage
dissolved 1961), 1963 Audrey Baker (one son, one daughter);
died London 6 December 2004.
When Yoko Ono met John Lennon in November 1966, she and her
then husband Tony Cox and their three-year-old daughter
Kyoko were living as the guests of an artist friend in
London, Adrian Morris. "The original weekend stay turned
into several months," remembers Morris's widow, Audrey.
"They proposed - unsuccessfully - making their film of
bottoms at the house, even offering Adrian the incentive of
being one of the film's directors."
Adrian Morris was not an artist who sought commercial
attention. For him selling a picture was like cutting off a
limb. His work has rarely been exhibited in the half-century
since he was a student and his exhibitions can be counted on
less than two hands. Even so, he was highly regarded by
perceptive peers who knew his pictures.
One was the painter Michael Wishart, who met Morris at the
Anglo-French Art Centre, in St John's Wood, in 1947-48. In
his 1977 autobiography, High Diver, Wishart recalled Morris
as "the most obviously promising student" there, who was
"unhurriedly developing into a very original artist indeed.
I know of no other painter of my age whose work is more
likely to interest posterity."
A year later, Wishart extended his eulogy in an article for
Harpers & Queen about Morris's 16 paintings in the "Hayward
Annual '78" exhibition. This was an important mid-career
outing for the painter, then physically and artistically
isolated in a London suburb.
Wishart was in a unique position to chart the "secretive"
Morris's enigmatic pictorial language. For Wishart, like the
Symbolists Morris was striving "to evoke, not to describe."
He recalled how in the 1950s Morris had begun
a series of aerial (and ethereal) landscapes in tempera.
Dry, coloured vaguely as the sphinx, reminiscent of the
desolate parched estuaries of Africa seen by a bird in
flight, these sublime works suggest a lunar loneliness.
In the 1960s, "traces of human life began to appear in
Morris's desert, as alien tower blocks are now arising among
the pyramids". Wishart continued to outline Morris's
development, through Planet (1965), a "placidly shimmering
sphere" that "put an end to Morris's cosmic speculation";
through two major paintings, Military Storage Area (1966-67)
and Devastated City (1967), "a vulture's eye view of
Hiroshima"; to the paintings at the Hayward, that "recall
Sartre's masterpiece La Nausée - at once hyper-astringent,
poetic and profoundly moving", and "a new series of
paintings, Refugees . . . the tragic victims of our
insatiable barbarism".
In one of several catalogue notes, Morris explained that for
him "painting has been an attempt to create an environment
in which life could exist". Critics such as Sarah Kent
recognised that this was not easily accessible work,
demanding as it did a concentration of effort from the
viewer.
He was born Adrian Grant Morris in London in 1929 (though he
never showed as anything but Adrian Morris), the youngest of
three brothers. His father, Arthur, was curate at St John's,
Smith Square, his mother, Alison, of French descent. From
when he was aged three until 11, the Grant Morrises lived in
East Quantoxhead, Somerset, where his father had a living.
It was an idyllic childhood in a beautiful rectory, with
picnics on the Quantock hills and fossil collecting on the
nearby beach.
Adrian's mother took him and his brothers to America early
in the Second World War, where his father's aunt had houses
in New York and on the Hudson. Adrian attended the
progressive Putney School, in Vermont. His best friend was
another artist-to-be, Bradley Phillips, who recalled that,
at 14, Morris was already permitted to paint full-time. "To
its eternal credit the Putney School allowed highly
motivated students to pursue their artistic intellectual
obsessions virtually unhindered." A painting rival was Noel
Davis,
and they seemed to lead enviable lives, always excited and
involved with some project, no matter what adolescent social
and sexual agonies they were experiencing.
Morris is recalled at this time as spellbound, passing days
crawling on all fours among the piles of Surrealist
magazines which littered the floors of the Wittenborn
bookstore in New York. The watercolours on cardboard that he
produced as a result prompted the Putney School art teacher
Walter Kamis to collect his work and bring it to the
attention of John L. Sweeney, poetry professor at Harvard,
author of books on Henry James and Dylan Thomas, and one of
the first to recognise the genius of Robert Lowell.
Sweeney became Morris's aesthetic mentor. When, at 15,
Morris entered hospital with a complicated mastoid
condition, Sweeney kept him supplied with books on art and
Surrealist literature. Later, Morris studied the work of
Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, André Masson and Jean
Hélion and, above all, Giorgio de Chirico's "heroic" period,
a cardinal influence. He frequented Peggy Guggenheim's
gallery Art of This Century. Charles Duits, protégé of André
Breton, admired Morris's work at a small exhibition in
Sweeney's apartment. Morris was offered an exhibition at the
Anglo-American Centre in New York.
Through Sweeney, Morris met T.S. Eliot. The poet was the
Grant Morris family's constant companion on the return
voyage to England in 1947, strolling the deck arm-in-arm
with the beautiful and elegant Alison, signing her copy of
the Four Quartets, to which Morris's pictures have been
likened for their rhythmic and mysterious qualities.
Back in London, at the Anglo-French Art Centre, Morris was
taught by Oscar Dominguez, André Lhote and Jean Lurçat. It
was there that Wishart first saw the 17-year-old painter
"seated before an astonishing drawing which recalled Odilon
Redon and Blake, another important influence".
Morris served his non-commissioned two-year National Service
in the Royal Horse Guards, partly in Germany. He liked the
routine, although a need for discipline and tidiness did not
come easily to him, and he was often in the guardhouse.
After studies at L'Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris,
1950-51, he spent four years at the Royal Academy Schools.
Daily he took the same place in the life room, an immaculate
figure with a stiff white collar, known to his friends as
Lord Whatman, after a superior drawing paper. This was his
short-lived dapperly dressed period.
In 1955, the year of his solo show at the St George's
Gallery, Morris's work was included in the series "Artists
of Fame and Promise" at the Leicester Galleries and again
there in 1957 in the Winter Exhibition. It was 12 years
before he showed again, in "The Poetic Image", at the
Hanover Gallery; there was a further nine-year gap before
his inclusion in the Hayward Annual in 1978.
Between 1957 and 1989 Morris taught art and pottery
part-time at various London secondary schools, including
Dick Sheppard School at Tulse Hill. Meanwhile, his
technically superb oil-on-gesso panels slowly evolved with
painstaking effort. He would return endlessly to pictures,
making almost imperceptible changes, striving for
perfection.
His widow recalls:
We joked about the way that people would remove things from
Giacometti's studio and threatened to do the same with his
paintings, otherwise he would be working on them
continuously. Adrian's work was so much part of him that to
expose it to anybody outside who would not really understand
it was more than he could contemplate.
Although the artist Morris was private, intense and serious
regarding his work, as a person he was gregarious, open,
trusting and without guile. He had a wide circle of friends
and was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, a generous giver
of parties with an eclectic mix.
His work continued developing in isolation, the palette -
always noted for his use of earth colours, such as beige and
brown - becoming darker, with less use of reds and blues.
After the Hayward Gallery exhibition he showed rarely, never
again having a solo exhibition. Lately he had become more
interested in exhibiting, and at least one major West End
gallery has expressed interest in his very particular
images.
David Buckman