Morris Graves

The story of the homes of Morris Graves, a leading figure in Northwest Art and one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century, illustrated with beautiful duotone photographs. Author and photographer Richard Svare makes clear that the world his close friend Morris Graves inhabited physically was the world he experienced transcendentally. Morris Graves soared from obscurity to fame in 1942, when thirty of his works appeared in New York's 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." 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 eighty-five miles north of Seattle. He built a home in Ireland and spent the last thirty-five years of his life in Northern California.