George Morrison profited from educational opportunities that influenced his work beyond the experiences of the majority of Indigenous painters of his generation.¹ Born in 1919, as Morrison came of age he was exposed to the growing numbers of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist artists, critics, and patrons whose influences were ultimately revealed in Untitled. Of this period Morrison stated:

I went through a period of using thick paint….This gave more immediacy to the painting. Putting the paint on without thinning it with oil, or using acrylic paint without any water added. Putting it on thick on the brush and then on the canvas with broad strokes, showing the thickness and movement of the pigment.²

Morrison engaged with the notions of gestural and color field painting and his work was impacted by that of both Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose influences can be seen in the movement and immediacy of his brushwork on the canvas surface. After returning from study in Europe in fall 1953, the act of painting became the elemental factor that defined Morrison’s artwork beyond critical qualifiers of ethnicity, race, and tribalism, which non-Indians had applied to art by artists of Indian ancestry. Morrison had become internationalized by training and gestural in his style, and his Native heritage, while celebrated, was not a qualifier of his artistic expression as a painter. Like Fritz Scholder, Morrison stated:

I never played the role of being an Indian artist. I always just stated the fact that I was a painter, and I happened to be Indian. I wasn’t exploiting the idea of being Indian at all, or using Indian themes.³

      Untitled is a statement of color and dynamic movement that uses vibrant reds, oranges, and yellows across the canvas surface. Morrison’s thick impasto brushstrokes layer paint in vertical strokes that present large areas of brighter colors in the foreground and darker blues, greens and black receding behind. Devoid of the biomorphic shapes, identifiable motifs, and organic structures of his earlier Surrealistic expressions, the painting is an exercise in color and abstraction. Without reliance on the stereotypical expectations of genre scenes, primitivistic themes, and underlying references to nature in an idealized ahistorical past, Untitled remains a significant marker of Morrison’s exploration of Abstract Expressionism. Gerald Vizenor characterized Morrison's paintings of this period as dominated by their verticality, endless space, and lack of horizon line. In both his paintings and his later wood sculptures, there is a freedom from the confines of the labeling that was applied to early schools of Indian painting in the Southwest and Oklahoma. Yet, without the geographical suggestions of individual tribal motifs and locations, Morrison’s examination of abstraction has been overlooked in the canon of American art. Although his association with the “big boys” of the New York School was inclusive of his work, it has been largely unobserved by academic scholarship. In redress, Morrison’s close association with the giants of American abstraction has recently been reassessed by the 2004 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of the American Indian which featured his work alongside that of Allan Houser.

¹ Morrison attended Minneapolis School of Art (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) 1938-1943, the Art Students League, New York, 1943-46, received a Fulbright Scholarship, 1952-53, to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, University of Aix-Marseilles, Aix-en-Provence, France, and the Opportunity Fellowship, John Hay Whitney Foundation, 1953.

² Margot Fortunato-Galt, Turning the Feather Around, My Life in Art: George Morrison, (Saint Paul, MN, Minnesota Historical Society Press. 1998), 101.

³ Gerald Vizenor, “George Morrison, Anishinaabe Expressionist Artist,” American Indian Quarterly 30, No. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn, 2006), 646-660.