Morris Graves; Mystical Painter Portrayed Plants and Animals

Morris Graves, a leading artist of the American Northwest whose delicately haunting image of a blind bird is imprinted on the consciousness of art lovers all over the world, has died. Known as the last of a regional group of painters who shared a mystical philosophy, Graves died Saturday after suffering a stroke at his home near the Northern California town of Loleta. He was 90.

Graves was a student of Zen Buddhism and Vedantic philosophies who became known for gentle images of plants and animals that embody a spirit of transcendence. His work resonated with the hippie generation of the 1960s, but he was a forerunner of that counterculture whose art took root in Eastern religions, surrealist visions and his natural environment.

Reviewing an exhibition of his work in 1984 at the Oakland Museum, former Times art critic William Wilson described Graves as “a spiritual and stylistic wanderer whose work embodies the aesthetic, ethical and psychological perils of religious eclecticism.” He saw art not as an end in itself, but as a reflection of spiritual enlightenment, Wilson said.

Born on Aug. 28, 1910, in Fox Valley, Ore., Graves grew up in Seattle as a sickly child. He dropped out of high school in 1928, but joined his brother Russell in a robust venture, as seamen on the American Mail Line to the Far East. Those youthful travels initiated Morris Graves’ lifelong interest in Asian art and culture. Upon his return to the United States in 1932, he finished high school in Beaumont, Texas, then returned to Seattle and became part of a fledgling artistic community.

Essentially self-taught, Graves drew from nature, as well as his fertile imagination, and developed his own style by the late 1930s. During his early years, he supported himself by joining the WPA Federal Arts Project in 1936-37 and working at the Seattle Art Museum in 1940-42.

He soared from obscurity to fame in 1942, when 30 of his works appeared in New York at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Americans 1942: 18 Artists from Nine States.” A review in ARTnews magazine praised his paintings as the “sensation of the show.” His work became more widely known in 1953, when Life magazine published a feature story on four “Mystic Painters of the Northwest”: Graves and his colleagues Mark Tobey, Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan. Though their styles varied, the artists all approached their art with reverence for nature and a keen interest in Eastern religion.

Partly because he chose to live in the Northwest, Graves was often said to be reclusive. Many of his early paintings were created at “The Rock,” a cabin he built for himself near Anacortes, about 85 miles north of Seattle, and he spent the last 35 years of his life in Northern California. But he was actually a charismatic figure who traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia. He studied in Japan on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947, developed friendships with avant-garde artists, including composer John Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham, and enjoyed hobnobbing with celebrities and royalty.

Throughout his career, Graves compiled an extensive exhibition record and garnered dozens of prizes. His work is represented in many public and private collections, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, Washington’s Phillips Collection and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Probably the largest single holding of his work--encompassing 100 paintings and an archive of about 300 sketches and papers that illuminate his experimental techniques and methods of observation--is in the collection of the Museum of Art at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

“He was a terrific draftsperson who had an acute sense of observation,” Lawrence Fong, the museum’s curator of regional art, said of the breadth and depth of the holding. A series of drawings on hibernation shows how hair grows on animals’ ears, Fong noted, and drawings of a Chinese bronze in the shape of a pheasant illustrate the artist’s fascination with anthropomorphic forms.

The museum purchased the works directly from the artist in 1968, but that core collection has attracted gifts of additional pieces, Fong said. Although Graves worked on a small scale in water-based media, “an aesthetic that has been left behind,” as the curator put it, Graves still looms large in the Northwest. The museum’s exhibition program will keep his memory alive, Fong said.