A founding member of the American Abstract Artists group (which banded together in 1936) and the first art critic for the Partisan Review (from 1937 to 1943), George L. K. Morris was a passionate advocate for the formulation of what he called "an authentic American culture.”¹ Disturbed by the absence of a clearly defined, extensive national artistic heritage, Morris believed: "Ours has been the first era to boast a civilized land without its own civilization…. The creative artist … has no background … upon which to draw; the only remote past this country knows is one of the forest and Indians, and all the artist's materials he must deliberately create.”²

Morris, whose earliest-known paintings date from 1929, engaged Native American subjects in his work from the beginning of his career through the 1940s. Generated by childhood exposure to the New England landscape of rural Berkshire County and its rich cultural history, which originated with the Woodland Indians, Morris came to locate correspondences between the simplified forms of indigenous artifacts and the modernist aesthetic interest in paring the language of art to essential, abstract shapes. Morris was more than acquainted with the Cubists' distillation of the formal attributes of the work of African and Oceanic—or so-called primitive—artists in their compositions. As a student of Fernand Léger in Paris in 1929 and 1930, he was brought into contact with prevailing avant-garde preoccupations, such as the reduction or erasure of specific narrative content and literal meaning in art through focus on "purely plastic qualities.”³ Morris's mingling of Native American imagery and elements—the inclusion of birch bark fragments in Indians Hunting is a witty pictorial trope—with abstract designs is a conscious effort to move American art into mainstream, international art discourse.

From the outset, Morris never made any claims to be original. In fact, he felt the whole artistic enterprise should be considered only in "relationship to what it has built upon.”⁴ His work was synthetic, in part dependent upon foreign precedent, but it had a certain ingenuity that came from recasting French stylistic ideas in terms of distinctly American subjects. Morris regarded his use of other artists' formal inventions as standard cultural practice, one that was permissible, especially if American art was to move beyond the predominant modes of Social Realist and Regional art which defined the national cultural scene during the 1930s. The imprint of artists such as Leger is clearly readable in Indians Hunting through the color shapes that make up the background of an otherwise monochromatic painting. The toylike images of Native Americans in the foreground—perhaps derived from pictographs⁵—have a uniformity and sameness that is also reminiscent of Léger's figures.

Leger was a figure whom Morris singled out as the "real primitive, the adventurer who draws upon his new horizon rather than on talk of art.”⁶ Encapsulated in this accolade is Morris's own desire to achieve a certain universality for American art. Through his various compositions with Native American themes, he aimed to create painting that was "enduring,”⁷ a bold and far-reaching assertion of formal ideas that would withstand criticism and time.

Debra Bricker Balken, Addison Gallery of American Art: 65 Years, A Selective Catalogue (Andover, Massachusetts: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1996), pp. 433-34


1. George L. K. Morris, "The Quest for an Abstract Tradition," in American Abstract Artists, ed. Balcomb Greene et al. (New York: American Abstract Artists, 1938), unpaginated.

2. George L. K. Morris, "Contemporary Writers, British and Americans," Yale Literary Magazine 93 (March 1928), p. 1O3.

3. George L. K. Morris, quoted in Melinda Lorenz, George L. K. Morris, Artist and Critic (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1981, rev., UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982), p. 11.

4. George L. K. Morris, "On Fernand Léger and Others," The Miscellany 1 (March 1931), p. 1.

5. This observation has been made by W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 93.

6. George L. K. Morris, "Fernand Leger Versus Cubism," The Bulletin of The
Museum of Modern Art 3 (October 1935), p. 7.

7. George L. K. Morris, "Art Chronicle: Some Personal Letters to American Artists Recently Exhibiting in New York," Partisan Review 4 (March 1938), p. 38.