Description:
abstract; gold collaged ground with white, black, grey and orange collaged elements
Label Text:
Born into a wealthy New York family, Maud Morgan fled the strictures of her aristocratic life to study art in Paris in the early 1930s. There, she befriended Ernest and Pauline Hemingway and James Joyce, and met her husband, the painter Patrick Morgan, who encouraged her artistic ambitions. The Morgans moved to New York, where Maud exhibited her paintings at the legendary Betty Parsons Gallery alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Just as her career was blooming, the couple transplanted to the suburbs of Boston, where Patrick had accepted a teaching job. While the move undermined Morgan’s chances for serious artistic recognition, it did not stem her creative output. Morgan produced work into the final decade of her life, dying at the age of 96.
In the late 1960s, Morgan began making brightly colored screenprints of abstract shapes. The screenprinting process began with cutting up Color-Aid papers and arranging them by pinning them to the wall. This mock-up was then presented to a studio printer, who transposed the collage into a two-dimensional surface. The clean lines and formal precision of the screenprint, and its opportunities for the interplay of spatial elements through a subtle melding of color, appealed to Morgan’s interest in the emotional and psychological drama of shape and form.
But the collage—the model for Morgan’s screenprints—also captured the artist’s imagination. “One day a client came into my studio and wanted to buy one,” Morgan recalled. “I told her I was about to have the edition printed. ‘Not the print,’ she said. ‘I want the mock-up.’” Collage was Morgan’s media of choice in her 90s, and she produced over 400 works, often mixing ordinary colored paper with wallpaper scraps and burned matches.
Tags:
abstract Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2012.1.22 |
