Robert Morris, 87, Dies; Founding Minimalist Sculptor With Manifold Passions
Robert Morris’s “Untitled (Labyrinth),” from 1974, when he was extending the possibilities of Minimalism and sculpture in general in a dizzying variety of ways.
Credit
2018 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Castelli Gallery, New York
By Ken Johnson
Nov. 29, 2018
Robert Morris, one of the most controversial American sculptors of the post-World War II era as a founder of Minimalism, a style of radical simplification that emerged in the 1960s and influences artists to this day, died on Wednesday in Kingston, N.Y. He was 87.
His wife, Lucile Michels Morris, said the cause was pneumonia.
Mr. Morris was one of a generation of artists who embraced the Minimalist credo, along with Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and others. But while his peers continued to work within the genre’s austere limits, Mr. Morris went on to explore an astonishing variety of stylistic approaches, from scatter art, performance and earthworks to paintings and sculptures symbolizing nuclear holocaust.
His detractors, noting his tendency to borrow ideas from other artists freely, questioned his originality and authenticity. His supporters saw in him a mind too restlessly alive to the possibilities of art to be confined to any one style.
But nearly all agree that most of the major issues in art of the last half-century were highlighted in one phase or another of Mr. Morris’s prolific, mercurial career.
If Mr. Morris’s work puzzled some viewers, he was reluctant to explain it. In an interview with The New York Times in 2017, he said, “I would rather short-circuit the question and hide behind Chekhov’s remark that art should ask questions rather than give answers.”
Mr. Morris in 2017. One of a generation of artists who embraced the Minimalist credo, he later explored a staggering variety of stylistic approaches.
Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Robert Eugene Morris was born on Feb. 9, 1931, in Kansas City, Mo., to Lora Pearl (Schrock) Morris and Robert Obed Morris. His father was in the livestock business, and his parents also briefly owned a dry-cleaning business.
He first studied art — but not sculpture — at the Kansas City Art Institute and then, in the early 1950s, at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. After a stint in the Army Corps of Engineers, during which he served in Korea, Japan and elsewhere, he attended Reed College in Oregon from 1953 to 1955.
Back in San Francisco, Mr. Morris made Abstract Expressionist paintings, which he showed in two solo exhibitions, and became involved in theater, dance and film.
In 1956 he married Simone Forti, a dancer who would go on to become a leading choreographer and teacher of modern dance. They moved to New York City in 1959 and became part of a downtown scene made up of avant-garde painters, musicians, dancers and performance artists. There, Mr. Morris’s interests continued to lead in several directions. (His marriage to Ms. Forti ended in divorce, in 1962, as did his second marriage, to Priscilla Johnson.)
Mr. Morris began producing sculpture: small neo-Dada works full of witty, self-referential effects, paradoxes and puns, all made under the influence of Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns. “I-Box,” for example, had a small door in the shape of a capital letter I, which opened to reveal a full-length photograph of the artist wearing a grin and nothing else.
“Untitled (Scatter Piece),” from 1968-1969, at the Castelli Gallery in 2010. “Plywood was cheap, plentiful, standard and ubiquitous” in those years, he said. “It was unstressed as an art material, an ‘ordinary’ material in the industrial world.”
Credit
2018 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Castelli Gallery, New York
Mr. Morris exhibited these works in his first New York solo show, at the Green Gallery in 1963.
He pursued a master’s degree in art history at Hunter College in Manhattan, writing his thesis on the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi. He began teaching at Hunter in 1964 and continued to do so into his later years.
Interested in dance as well, he became involved in the Judson Dance Theater, a group committed to Minimalist dance styles. Ms. Forti was a leading member, and Mr. Morris himself choreographed and performed in several Judson productions.
In one piece, “Site,” Mr. Morris, wearing a mask depicting his own face, moved sheets of plywood about like a workman and in doing so revealed a nude woman reproducing the reclining pose of Edouard Manet’s “Olympia.”
Mr. Morris constructed sets and props for Judson performances as well. One of these, “Column,” a six-foot-tall monolith made of plywood, is considered by some his first Minimalist sculpture.
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He subsequently constructed a series of simple, medium-large geometric objects of plywood, painted pale gray, as works of pure sculpture. Exhibited at the Green Gallery in 1964, these extremely simple and plain structures — a long beam that lay on the floor, a suspended slab, a triangular form that filled a corner — perplexed and bored many critics. But they put Mr. Morris on the map of the art avant-garde.
Robert Morris’s “Untitled (Labyrinth),” from 1974, when he was extending the possibilities of Minimalism and sculpture in general in a dizzying variety of ways.
Credit
2018 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Castelli Gallery, New York
Why plywood? “Plywood was cheap, plentiful, standard and ubiquitous,” he told The Times in 2017. “It was unstressed as an art material, an ‘ordinary’ material in the industrial world. The tools required to work plywood were common and readily at hand; the skill required to manipulate them was relatively undemanding; carpentry was another ‘ordinary’ everyday skill in the urban late industrial milieu.”
In 1966, Mr. Morris joined the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan, where he exhibited his work throughout his career, as well as at the Sonnabend Gallery, also in New York.
The importance of his Minimalist work was not just in its introducing a new style of abstraction. Rather, it set up a new kind of relationship between the viewer and the artwork. Because the sculptures lacked the complex internal relationships of traditional composition, the viewer would focus on the object’s relationship to the architecture of the room and its effect on his or her perceptual experience of space, light and shape.
This reorientation paved the way for many different kinds of art to come, in which environmental — and, at times, flagrantly theatrical — experience would prevail over that of finely made objects.
In 1966, in Artforum magazine, Mr. Morris began to publish a series of essays called “Notes on Sculpture” in which he analyzed the new sculpture that he and others were producing. These influential writings did almost as much to certify his importance as his actual sculpture did.
Robert Morris, “Gypsy Moth,” 2017.
Credit
2018 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Castelli Gallery, New York
Mr. Morris extended the possibilities of Minimalism and sculpture in general in a dizzying variety of ways from the early 1960s into the ′70s. He produced elementary structures in semitransparent materials like expanded steel mesh or translucent plastic, organized identical forms in serial groups, created optically confounding works using mirrors, built labyrinths, and began to explore less rigidly structured means of activating space, like scattering materials randomly about the gallery.
He also created large wall hangings of thick felt — cut, folded or draped — and he produced a major Stonehenge-like outdoor earthwork, “Observatory,” in Holland.
One of his most notorious acts was to appear in an exhibition poster in 1974 in which he was photographed naked from the waist up wearing a Nazi helmet, sunglasses and chains, suggestive of some kind of sadomasochistic sexual ritual.
Mr. Morris’s reputation as an innovator working on all fronts was at its peak in the early 1970s. In a review in The Times in 1972, Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “Morris was, for a moment, a nearly transcendent art world presence, an artist who, it seemed, could do no wrong.”
Later in the decade, however, contemporary art began to change in ways unfavorable to Mr. Morris’s formalist, coolly cerebral sensibility. From the neo-Expressionism of Julian Schnabel to the neo-Pop protest art of Barbara Kruger, art became more representational, more personal and more political, and Mr. Morris’s reputation for up-to-the-minute saliency was never again what it was in the ′60s.
“Untitled (Dirt),” by Robert Morris. His work ranged from scatter art, performance and earthworks to paintings and sculptures symbolizing nuclear holocaust.
Credit
2018 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Bill Jacobson, via Dia Art Foundation
He did change with the tide, however, producing in the early 1980s darkly baroque meditations on the threat of nuclear destruction. In a series he titled “Firestorm,” he created heavy sculptural frames in which skulls, clawing hands, ropes, chains, phallic forms and other symbols of violence and conflict were cast; within, infernally glowing pastels evoking J. M. W. Turner abstractly envisioned the world’s fiery end.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1984, Mr. Morris is survived by a daughter, Laura Morris, and a sister, Donna Caudle. Mr. Morris, who died in Kingston Hospital, lived in Gardiner, N.Y.
Into the 1990s Mr. Morris continued to produce draped felt works; heavy lead reliefs that recall his early, Jasper Johns-influenced works; and autobiographical installations using text and sound.
In 2017, he presented his latest felt pieces while revisiting his earlier work in a show at the Castelli Gallery’s Upper East Side branch. Since Oct. 30, the gallery has put new Morris works on view in “Banners and Curses,” a show that runs through Jan. 25.
From start to finish, as a sprawling retrospective exhibition mounted by the Guggenheim Museum in 1994 showed, Mr. Morris defied the conventional rule of one style per artist.
Looking back on his career, he wrote in his introduction to “Continuous Project Altered Daily,” a collection of his essays published in 1993: “I never set out to prove or demonstrate so much as to investigate. And I never set out to affirm so much as to negate.”
Yet it is clear, too, that he was driven by an abiding belief in the importance and power of art. “In art’s irrational games and its depth of feelings,” he wrote in a late essay, “in its awe and cynicism, its mournings and derisions, its anger and grace, it bears witness to a dark century.”
Correction: November 29, 2018
An earlier version of this obituary misstated part of Mr. Morris’s wife’s name. She is Lucile Michels Morris, not Michaels. Because of an editing error, the earlier version also misstated Mr. Morris’s middle name. It was Eugene, not Clarke.
Ana Fota contributed reporting.
Beeldhouwer Robert Morris was een theatrale pionier van minimal art
Overleden
Robert Morris (1931-2018) was theoreticus, criticus, beeldhouwer, betrokken bij dans en maker van land-art. Het Observatorium in de Flevopolder is een van zijn bekendste werken.
Sandra Smallenburg
30 november 2018
Foto ANP/ Vincent Wigbels
„Een simpele vorm valt niet noodzakelijk samen met een simpele ervaring”, schreef beeldhouwer Robert Morris in 1966 in zijn essay Notes on Sculpture. Zijn beelden mochten er dan uitzien als doodgewone kubussen, koel en modernistisch zoals veel van de minimalistische kunst van die tijd, dat betekende niet dat de werken geen ziel hadden. Schaal, textuur, zwaarte, materiaal – het waren allemaal aspecten waar je als toeschouwer van kon genieten, vond hij.
Foto Rob Crandall/Getty Images
De 87-jarige kunstenaar overleed woensdag aan een longontsteking, in Kingston, New York. Met zijn geometrische beelden, maar vooral ook met zijn theoretische artikelen in het toonaangevende kunsttijdschrift Artforum, behoorde Morris tot de voorhoede van de abstracte kunststroming minimal art. Samen met Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt en Dan Flavin bestormde hij in de jaren zestig de kunstwereld met rechthoekige sculpturen, gemaakt van industriële materialen als staal, glas of hout.
Hoewel de minimalisten zich nooit als hechte groep presenteerden en het vaak oneens waren, zijn ze van ongekende invloed geweest op de naoorlogse beeldhouwkunst. Morris, die ook als kunstcriticus opereerde, gaf hun kunst een theoretische basis.
Foto Rob Crandall/Getty Images
Robert Morris werd op 9 februari 1931 geboren in Kansas City en studeerde aan de Kansas City Art Institute en de California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Nadat hij met het Amerikaanse leger gediend had in Korea en Japan volgde hij tussen 1953 en 1955 een studie filosofie aan Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Hij vestigde zich als kunstenaar in San Francisco en begon zijn carrière met het maken van abstract-expressionistische schilderijen. In 1959 verhuisde hij naar New York, waar hij terechtkwam in de avant-gardistische kunstenaarskringen van Manhattan. Intussen volgde hij een studie kunstgeschiedenis aan Hunter College, en studeerde hij af op de beeldhouwkunst van Constantin Brancusi.
Als een van de eersten maakte hij in de vroege jaren zestig sculpturen met puur geometrische vormen, die hij in de Green Gallery exposeerde. Grijs geschilderde houten kubussen en driehoeken, cilinders en L-balken strooide hij als decorstukken door de expositieruimte. Later gebruikte hij ook staal, plexiglas en plastic voor zijn kunstwerken - als het maar goedkoop was en makkelijk te verkrijgen.
Een simpele vorm valt niet noodzakelijk samen met een simpele ervaring
Robert Morris
Maar hoe streng en rigide zijn beelden ook oogden, Morris was niet wars van een flinke portie theatraliteit. Zo maakte hij in 1961 de sculptuur Box with sound of its own making, een houten kistje met daarin een taperecorder met geluiden die hij had opgenomen tijdens de drieënhalf uur dat het hem had gekost om het kistje te maken. Samen met zijn eerste echtgenote, de choreografe Simone Forti, maakte hij dansstukken voor het Judson Dance Theater in New York. Soms speelde hij zelf mee, zoals in Site uit 1964. Getooid met een masker van zijn eigen gezicht sleepte Morris met platen triplex heen en weer over het podium, om uiteindelijk het naakte lichaam van perfomancekunstenaar Carolee Schneemann te onthullen die achterover lag als op Manets Olympia.
Vanaf 1967 maakte hij ‘felt-pieces’, vilten lappen die hij aan de muur exposeerde en waarbij de zwaartekracht zorgde voor de uiteindelijke vorm. Zijn werk werd steeds speelser en bood steeds meer ruimte aan de ervaring van de bezoeker. Zo maakte hij in de jaren zeventig diverse labyrinten waarin eindeloos gedwaald kon worden.
Foto Hollandse Hoogte
Met zijn minimalistische beeldtaal was Morris ook van grote invloed op de landartkunstenaars die vanaf de late jaren zestig hun werken in de Amerikaanse woestijnen bouwden. Zelf heeft hij één belangrijk landschapswerk nagelaten, Observatorium, dat nog altijd te vinden is in de Flevopolder. Het werk is een soort moderne versie van Stonehenge: een cirkelvormige ruimte die als een enorme zonnewijzer uitgelijnd is met de stand van de zon in verschillende jaargetijden.
Observatorium
De eerste versie van zijn Observatorium maakte Morris in opdracht van de legendarische, door Wim Beeren georganiseerde tentoonstelling Sonsbeek buiten de perken in 1971. Het werk, met een doorsnede van zeventig meter, was destijds te bezoeken op een braakliggend terrein tussen Velsen en Santpoort, ingeklemd tussen snelwegen. Na afloop van de tentoonstelling werd het, ondanks vele protesten, gesloopt. Dankzij de inspanningen van museumdirecteuren Wim Beeren en Edy de Wilde en kunstverzamelaar Frits Becht kwam er in 1977 een tweede en grotere versie, met een diameter van negentig meter.
In de jaren tachtig, toen het minimalisme uit de mode raakte, veranderde Morris’ stijl vrij drastisch en ging hij figuratief werk maken over de ‘nucleaire apocalyps’. Gipsen afgietsels van botten en schedels, maar ook tekeningen en pastels, toonden wat er van de mensheid na een kernramp overbleef.
Morris bleef tot het eind van zijn leven actief. In oktober opende er nog een expositie met nieuw werk in de Castelli Gallery in New York. Ook daar weer toonde hij zijn angsten voor een gewelddadige toekomst, met beelden van fiberglas vol politieke slogans (Curses) en banieren met angstaanjagende beelden die hij ontleend had aan Goya en Stanley Kubrick (Banners). Ze zijn er nog tot 25 januari te zien.
