The death of the visionary American artist Morris Graves, aged nearly 91, should stir up certain memories and associations among the older generation of art-lovers in this country. At a time when his international reputation as a painter was at its height, about four decades ago, Graves lived in Ireland - just outside Dublin, in fact - for a number of years. But Graves being Graves, he did not advertise the fact and the media were almost unaware of his presence, while he made relatively few contacts with Dublin art circles.
Throughout his long life, he had the reputation of being a recluse and something of a solitary nature mystic. Certain people who knew him personally claimed that this mystique was exaggerated and that Graves, when he chose to let down his guard, was quite approachable, even friendly, and at times very communicative. In fact, he seems to have been meditative and inward-looking rather than misanthropic, though with a good deal of the hermit-monk in his disposition. He belonged to a generation of American West Coast artists and writers who looked largely to the East for their intellectual and emotional sustenance. In the end, this grew into a cult and was vulgarised by the Beat generation, who evoked Zen philosophy as the rationale for a rather messy, exhibitionistic lifestyle of sex and drugs and pseudo-religious communes.
Graves was born into what seems to have been rural poverty in Fox Valley, Oregon, in 1910. He was the sixth of eight children, a moody, rather frail child who did not fit in locally and left school to become a seaman on the American Mail Line. In 1928 and 1929 he made voyages to Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and the Philippines, experiences which tilted him towards the Orient for the rest of his life. Years later he said: "In Japan, I at once had the feeling that this was the right way to do everything. It was the acceptance of nature, not the resistance to it. I had no sense that I was to be a painter, but I breathed a different air." His earliest efforts as an artist date from the early 1930s, when he drew animals and birds in the zoos of Los Angeles and San Diego. His first breakthrough came in 1933 when he won a prize offered by the Seattle Art Museum with a picture called Moor Swan. By then, Graves was living in Puget Sound, on a small island called Fidalgo on which he built a kind of studio-camp called The Rock. His work at this stage seems to have been dense-textured and Expressionist, with a strong influence from Van Gogh - a far cry from the outstanding delicacy and understatement of his later style. From 1936 to 1939, he profited by the Federal Arts Project sponsored by Roosevelt, which kept an entire generation of American artists - or rather, two generations - from destitution in the Depression years.
During this time, his style and approach changed radically, becoming far subtler, more rarefied and imaginatively oblique; Graves probably had encountered Surrealism, but almost certainly he also had encountered the art of Klee - well known in America since the 1920s. MOMA in New York included his work in prestige exhibitions, and though his career was interrupted by a spell in the US Army in 1942-43, he rapidly established himself as one of the most compelling and original of the American avant-garde.
Graves had little to do with European Modernism as represented by Cubism, abstraction and Constructivism. Instead he painted birds, animals, trees, waves, but imaginatively and not realistically, usually choosing tempera as his medium rather than oils. It was in the 1940s that he produced many of his best-loved works, such as Little-known Bird of the Inner Eye, Joyous Young Pine, and the strange, haunting series based on ceremonial Chinese bronze vessels. These works have been reproduced almost ad nauseam in textbooks on America art.
In the post-war years, especially the late 1950s, the so-called School of the Pacific Northwest earned a high profile, with Graves as one of its leading figures. His mentor and guide was the older painter Mark Tobey, even if he did not follow Tobey into abstract art; Tobey, too, was a noted Orientalist and mystic, and his so-called "white writing" had a strong influence on the younger man. Other members of the school, such as Kenneth Callaghan, seem to be almost forgotten today, but the artists involved - they were never a group - formed an important counterpoise to New York with its predominantly big-city ethos.
Nature and Eastern philosophy, along with Oriental calligraphy, formed the basis of their thinking, which was quite free from any backtracking ruralism or regionalism.
When Action Painting, or Abstract Expressionism, swept the boards, Graves kept both his balance and his reputation. His later work, however, never achieved quite the praise or popularity of his paintings from the 1940s and 1950s and many commentators found it conventional, without the unique, imagistic power of his earlier style. "Morris Graves?" an American painter said to me when I praised his work. "Sure - but the Graves of 1945, not the Graves of 1960." In retrospect, this seems unfair and one-sided. Graves in his later years painted mainly still life and flower pictures, but these have their own magic even if it is not the visionary, pantheistic aura of his best-known works. He became more "painterly" and traditional, using thicker paint than before, but utilising asymmetrical compositions and luminous, almost phosphorescent colours. The flower paintings, in particular, are probably the most beautiful of their kind since Odilon Redon. Yet there is anger, too, in the later pictures, a number of which have to do with machine-age noise and pollution - a growing obsession with him.
It was to escape from industrial noise, in particular, that Graves came to Ireland in the later 1950s, apparently seeking an unspoilt landscape and environment. As he explained at the time: "A private walled garden with the sounds of nature means much to me - it is my major nourishment from the outside world, and regardless of how others may see it I was driven out of Woodway by machine noise." In Ireland, however, he did not find quite the virgin paradise he was seeking. He lived just beyond Rathfarnham, in Co Dublin, and for the most part kept himself to himself, not exhibiting locally though he did mix a little with Irish artists and occasionally appeared at bohemian parties. (Actually, the first - and probably the last - Graves painting to be exhibited in Dublin was Spring with Machine Age Noise, included in the huge, sprawling, uneven exhibition "Art USA Now" mounted at the Dublin Municipal Gallery in 1964.) So far as I know, there is not a single work by him in any public collection in the British Isles, nor have I seen any in the leading Continental galleries. Apart from MOMA, one of the few places where his work can be seen in bulk is the Seattle Art Museum; and since the physical media he used - mostly tempera and watercolour on canvas, sometimes with ink added - are rather fragile, his pictures are unlikely to travel much abroad. Most of his working life was spent along America's Pacific Coast, where he died, and well away from the fickle, hectically competitive art world of New York. In his last years, he was seen or heard of very little, though by then he had become a personal legend.
The West Coast has a long tradition of Oriental immigration, and Seattle - the city with which Graves is closely associated - along with the inevitable Chinese and Japanese restaurants has Buddhist temples on its streets, as well as some important collections of Orientalia. So, like his spiritual father Tobey, or the great English potter Bernard Leach, Graves from early on in life was shaped to be an aesthetic bridge between East and West.
