Robert Morris is a conceptual American artist known for his sculptures produced in simple geometric forms. The artist’s writings became one of the first theoretical bases for Minimalism and provided Morris with the status of the prominent representative of this art style in the 1960s.
Background
Robert Morris was born on February 9, 1931, in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. He was raised in a suburb atmosphere.
The passion for the drawing began from the replicas of comic strip images he produced in free time after school.
Education
Robert Morris entered the University of Kansas in 1948 where he had studied engineering for a couple of years. Then, he shifted to the art curriculum both at the University of Kansas and at the Kansas City Art Institute.
In 1951, he became a student of San Francisco Art Institute in California but spent only one semester at the institution – he had to interrupt his studies for the military service.
After his return, Morris enrolled at the Reed College in 1953 in Portland, Oregon, United States where he had learned philosophy and psychology for two years.
In 1959, he pursued his artistic training at the Hunter College in New York City where he studied art history. Four years later, Morris received his Master of Arts degree with a thesis on Constantin Brancusi.
Robert Morris started his career in 1951 when he joined the United States Army Corps of Engineers and spent there one year.
As to the artistic field, he began as a painter of large monochromatic abstract landscapes. The first solo show of his canvases was organized in 1958 at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco, California.
In the late 1950s, Morris left painting and concentrated on performance art, in particular, on dance and choreography. He was interested in the potential of body movements – along with his wife, a dancer Simone Forti, the artist established several theatre workshops. The couple took part at the Judson Dance Theater for which Robert Morris choreographed some performances, like Arizona (1963), 21.3 (1964), Site (1964), and Waterman Switch (1965).
Morris created his first plywood sculpture in 1961 – it was a composition titled Box with the Sound of Its Own Making which was followed by the Fountain two years later. The same year, the artist presented his minimalist sculptures at his debut solo exhibition of this media at the Green Gallery in New York City. The visitors of the gallery had an opportunity to admire Morris’s artworks again in 1963, 1964 and 1965.
Despite his artistic activity, Morris worked as a teacher as well. So, in 1964, he occupied the post of an art instructor in his alma mater, the Hunter College where he had served till 1975 when he became a professor of art.
In 1966, Robert Morris published one of his most influential essays on art titled ‘Notes on Sculpture’ in the Artforum magazine. In the writings, he insisted that the artwork's relationship to the audience was more important than the form of an art object. The same year, he presented a couple of his L Beams in the Jewish Museum in New York City.
At the beginning of the 1970s, the artist produced his first artwork related to the Land Art, called Steam which demonstrated the anti-form and Process Art principles of the artist. The result of this creation could be recorded only by the photographers. During the decade, Robert Morris continued to explore the land art by producing large-scale installations in which he often used such strange materials as dirt and litter. One of the examples of his earthworks became his Observatory in the Netherlands.
Thereafter, Morris experimented with the figurative art. In several outdoor pieces and temporary museum installations (at the Whitney Museum in New York City and the Tate Gallery in London), Morris, with the participation of others, created vast quasi-constructions using huge concrete blocks, steel beams, timbers, and other materials, including mirrors and fibreglass. They represented, like most of his work, a new order of reality, based not on theoretical or practical principles, but on the way elements naturally support one another. The powers of nature were thus arrogated to the artist.
During his career, the artist demonstrated his artworks around the United States and Europe, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and others. In 1994, the major retrospective of his art was held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The exposition travelled to Germany and France, to the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.
Nowadays, Robert Morris lives and works in New York City. His art is represented by Leo Castelli Gallery, Sonnabend Gallery, both in New York, City and by the Sprüth Magers in Berlin and London.
Quotations:
"Simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience."
"Have I reasons? The answer is my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons."
"There's information and there's the object; there's the sensing of it; there's the thinking that connects to process. It's on different levels. And I like using those different levels."
"I've been interested in memory and forgetting, fragments and wholes, theories and biographies, disasters and absurdities, and drawing but not dancing in the dark."
"So long as the form (in the broadest possible sense: situation) is not reduced beyond perception, so long as it perpetuates and upholds itself as being in the subject's field of vision, the subject reacts to it in many particular ways when I call it art. He reacts in other ways when I do not call it art. Art is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to some of one's awareness as art..."
"No to transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicizing narrative, valuable artifact, intelligent structure, interesting visual experience."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"The trouble with Morris’s work is that there is not enough to see,’ I knew I was on the right track." Donald Judd, an American artist
Connections
Robert Morris married a dancer and choreographer Simone Forti in 1955. The couple had lived together for seven years.