The Tragic Sense of Life: The Art of Jim Morphesis

Terrence E. Dempsey, SJ

AMONG those contemporary artists who have incorporated religious iconography into their work is a group whose relationship with religion can be described as one of positive ambiguity. While not professing a particular creed, these artists cannot leave the religious dimension alone. None of the artists in this category is intent on displaying irreverence or contempt for the traditions whose images and rituals they have incorporated into their art. Indeed, many of these artists have drawn on a smorgasbord of religious traditions, some no longer extant. In some cases, religious images provide the occasion for these artists to explore personal and political issues. In other cases, figures related to specific religious traditions become vehicles for the elucidation of a universal vision.

In much of his work, New York artist Jim Morphesis has explored the power of those sacred figures and symbols that are a part of his religious and cultural heritage. Since the end of the 1970s, Morphesis has incorporated implicit and explicit religious iconography into his work. The use of such imagery is not the result of glib borrowings or ironic appropriations; rather, Morphesis traces this iconography back to his earliest childhood memories.

Born in Philadelphia in 1948, Morphesis was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. As a child, he didn't understand the Greek language used in the liturgy, so his appreciation for the Orthodox ritual was mainly nonverbal—the chant, the incense and, most of all, the visual images that filled the church. It was, as Morphesis puts it, “a wonderful, sensual, mystical, and very spiritual experience.”

From this experience, the figures of Jesus on the cross and St. George conquering the dragon initiated Morphesis's interest in the heroic figure—a figure in touch with the divine and yet fully human. Likewise, his ethnic roots have made Morphesis aware of the Greek myths. Two myths in particular have proved influential on Morphesis: Prometheus, the god who wished to help humanity and who was punished for this act of generosity, and Icarus, the human who dared to let his reach exceed his grasp and who fell to his death fortrying not only to fly but to fly higher than was humanly prudent. In each of these figures, Morphesis senses the tensions between pride and humility that mark the martyr. Jesus, Prometheus, and Icarus, in Morphesis's view, refused to play it safe; they threw themselves into the heart of experience. For Jesus and Prometheus, the engagement with human reality was intended to help us and lift us up; for Icarus, the commitment was to attempt what had been regarded as an unachievable human aspiration. For all three, struggle lay at the core of their engagement with reality, and in each of these figures, Morphesis sees efforts to bridge the gap between the human and the divine.

While these themes were not always apparent in his work, his spiritual intentions were nevertheless present. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Morphesis produced highly minimalist pieces in the tradition of Barnett Newman that discreetly explored the spiritual dimension. Then in the late 1970s, Morphesis employed the cross shape without any corpus. As art historian Melinda Wortz points out, however, the incorporation of the cross form, especially the equal-armed cross, does not necessarily indicate a reference to religion. Wortz comments in the pages of Art News :

. . . in minimal art, as in Morphesis's previous series of paintings, the cruciform functioned more as archetypal structure than as religious symbol. From Malevich to André, abstract, iconic crosses have eschewed specific Christian references to the crucifixion.

Wortz indicates that Morphesis finally made explicit reference to overtly religious images when the resurgence of figurative painting took place at the beginning of the 1980s. Morphesis commented on his use of religious figuration in a 1982 interview:

I went to school in the formalist, minimal period—first the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and then the original Cal Arts. . . . I always felt that the heavy stuff was on the top of what I wanted to come out. It has only been in the last year that it became okay to let it out.

The reference to “heavy stuff” alludes to the physically thick structures and surfaces of his early painting-constructions—so thick that his paintings often weigh several hundred pounds. The physicality of Morphesis's art—the thick layers of rich and often brilliantly colored paint, gold foil (influenced by his roots in the Greek Orthodox Church), and materials worked onto and into his wooden substructures—functions very effectively in expressing tension between, and attempted integration of, the sensual and the spiritual, a theme found in much of his work.

The full significance of Morphesis's earlier abstract work, commanding in its strength and physicality, remained concealed from the viewer. Art professorPeter Clothier has commented on this in a 1982 Art in America review:

[Morphesis's] earlier work was characterized by its brooding dramatic strength, its juxtaposition of structural formality with expressive intensity, its crusty, abstract surfaces which always seemed to reveal less than they concealed. If these works suggested a drama of consciousness, it was being played out in materials whose significance remained obscure.

Commenting on Cross in Gray with Gold and other works done in 1981-82, Clothier continues by pointing out the noticeable change in Morphesis's art when the artist allowed the viewer to see into the depths of the “heavy stuff”:

The artist's recent paintings represent a remarkable step from that earlier abstract hermeticism into a new figurative mode. In one current series, the former surface crusts are progressively pulled back almost as curtains, revealing not only their own excrescent depth but also a substructure of wire mesh and crudely applied fragments of plywood, gaudily painted and forming a rough proscenium.

A kind of excavation was taking place that revealed not only previously hidden “subterranean” regions of Morphesis's work, but also cryptic written passages whose full meaning is known only to the artist and perhaps not even to him. Regarding these early “excavation” pieces, particularly a small work entitled La Tempesta [see front cover] which contains a double image of a Velasquez crucifixion, Clothier states: “It is as though the artist had literally torn through multiple layers of matter to find it.” Morphesis comments on the creation and the title of La Tempesta :

I couldn't put things back into the painting fast enough. There was revelation and concealment occurring in this work. I incorporated words in Latin, Greek, Italian, and English, most of which were concealed by other material. The original shape of the frame, a tribute to the Isenheim Altarpiece, was also partially concealed. There was also much that was being revealed. It was as if a storm where happening, hence the title. It was my first painting where both crucifixions were exposed. I felt that a big red curtain was being pulled back to reveal the images.

The “excavation” process soon yielded to “constructive” methods, as Morphesis would incorporate found lumber (lumber with its own history and character, as he describes it) into his compositions, cementing it with other materials in dynamic and dramatic constructions. This construction technique, coupled with the bold application and manipulation of such materials as oil, acrylic, rhoplex, magna, crystal silica, gold foil, and wire mesh, results in a work that has many affinities to Baroque art. It is work that not only intends to, but succeeds in involving the viewer. It also has much in common with theAmerican abstract-expressionist action paintings of Jackson Pollock and the “combines” of Robert Rauschenberg. In his classic 1952 essay, “The American Action Painters,” critic Harold Rosenberg described this “engaged” approach to art, an approach to which Morphesis enthusiastically responded throughout the 1980s:

The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.

While Morphesis's paintings share the materials and methods employed by artists such as Pollock and Rauschenberg, Morphesis is also profoundly aware of the great artists of the past. He has expressed his gratitude to a number of these artists by incorporating their imagery into his own work. For the past decade, he has “quoted” works by Matthias Grünewald, Giovanni Bellini, Diego Velasquez, and others. He has done this to establish “a personal relationship to my ancestors, and my real ancestors are the artists who have gone before me.”

Struggle has been a key element in Morphesis's work. The figures he frequently selects are those individuals from Scripture and Greek mythology whose lives are characterized by heroic struggle. Also, Morphesis himself has exerted great physical energy in the process of making his art, hammering on boards, slashing on paint, and performing construction work. The artist has had to quite literally struggle in the application of materials to his often rough-textured, three-dimensional surfaces.

Struggle is also reflected in the fact that many of his paintings are diptychs in which a dialectic tension is established. The thesis-antithesis combination continually operates without the sense of resolution and finality that a synthesis provides. This understanding was missed by writer and artist Betty Brown in her otherwise excellent review of his show at Traction Gallery in Los Angeles :

. . . appearing as they do in mirrored pairs, obsessively repeated beneath the slashes of biographic graffiti, the Jesuses also transcend iconic specificity to become objective signifiers. Ripped from their traditional contexts, displayed in serial multiplication, they shed symbolic depth and function as simple artistic tokens. Jesus becomes “pop.”

Dialectic tension—not mere “serial multiplication”—is very evident in a work like Oracle [see Plate 1] in which Morphesis twice paints the torso section of Velasquez's crucifixion and transforms it in such a way that we seem to be present at the moment of Christ's death. This writer has never seen a work that allows viewers to experience the last breath of Christ as powerfully as this painting does. The painting is large (64 inches x 68 inches x 7 inches deep) andis boldly colored with strong blacks and reds. The lumber on which the left torso of Christ is painted is built up around his chest area, and the lumber on which the right torso of Christ is painted forms a sculptural, concave space; the head of the right Christ is slightly lower than the left-side counterpart. We look at the moment of Christ's last breath, and through the handling of materials and juxtaposing of images, we actually see the expansion of the rib cage and its final contraction as Christ's head drops forward. No idealistic or photographically realistic painting could convey this profound moment as powerfully as Morphesis's expressionistic diptych does. The pain and suffering of Christ is rendered on the heaving and sinking surfaces. Embedded within the elaborate construction is an actual jacket whose sleeve hangs out at the bottom of the work, perhaps a sign of the artist's own personal engagement not only with this image but also with the reality behind the image.

Morphesis also uses dialectic tension in images that are not in double formats. A good example is his work based on Giovanni Bellini's sixteenth-century Pieta with St. John . Morphesis calls his own version Destiny [see back cover] and he edits out the St. John figure found in the Bellini work in order to concentrate on the mother-son relationship during this time of profound grief. The painting reflects the sadness, the love, and the great strength of this mother figure, and it touches chords of loss. Morphesis achieves this without melodrama, for the Bellini-inspired face of Christ appears serene while the face of Mary reflects a grief accompanied by a tender concern for her son—a concern that seems to extend beyond death. Yet the pain is there—the pain Christ experienced during his passion, and the pain experienced by the mother while watching her son die. The tension and pain are also dramatically expressed through the criss-crossing of the lumber on which the images are painted. The experience of grief is not contained by a frame (either physical or psychological); rather, the edges of this painting extend the sorrow of the grieving mother into our own present space and time.

Even when Morphesis works on paper, his paintings remain large, powerful, and often as turbulently dramatic as his paintings on wood. In 1985, Morphesis did several large works on paper on the theme of Icarus Falling. Significantly, he subtitled one of those works Descent from the Cross , thereby combining the God who reached out to us by becoming human and the human who aspires to the heavens. Using oil, charcoal, pastel, and collaged materials on the paper, Morphesis gives us a poignant Baroque S-shaped torso that is dramatically illuminated in the chiaroscuro technique. Although this work lacks Morphesis's usual build-up of materials that extend into our space, it is nevertheless a dramatic piece in which the form and the charged application of materials combine to express a common theme: heroic aspiration, suffering, martyrdom, and the triumph of the spirit.

Morphesis has also completed several large construction paintings that present us with a massive human skull. Among the inspirations for this work was Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno's great book, The Tragic Sense of Life . For Unamuno, Christian faith involves an awareness of the reality of sin, suffering, and death—the “tragic sense.” At the same time, according to Unamuno, Christ's passion and resurrection show that the experience of suffering is an integral part of our redemption. Morphesis addresses Unamuno's willingness to confront suffering and death as well as Unamuno's ability “to deal with [these things] in such a loving and positive way.” In Skull Painting (No Messiah) [see Plate 2], Morphesis uses the vanitas tradition to express Unamuno's awareness of death and affirmation of life—an affirmation based on honestly acknowledging our own mortality. In a culture obsessed with the denial of death, this large skull is a challenge to the viewer. It speaks of tragedy and time, and ultimately about our triumph even in the face of death. Morphesis expresses this not only through the incorporation of the skull but also in the dramatic, gestural, and turbulent application of paint. The parenthetical subtitle for the work, No Messiah , is not a denial of God; rather, it is a humble realization that our contemporary penchant for deifying both artist and art as replacements for real faith does not offer salvation. Morphesis states it this way:

After feeling so positive about the paintings I was doing and after feeling that I was resurrecting an image and giving it new importance, I realized that these paintings weren't the saviors anymore. I question whether I was adding anything. . . . Finally, all of these objects are made by mere mortals. They aren't a substitute for something else; they can be triggers to something else—but they aren't the something else. When there are fires, paintings burn up. When there are earthquakes, they fall. They all will return to the earth eventually.

Recently, Morphesis has moved away from violent wooden constructions and thick, almost sculptural, application of paint. His work is still expressive, but smoother and smaller in scale. In 1992 and 1993, Morphesis was again using the torso, acknowledging the evocative power of so many classical torso fragments discovered in Greece and Italy . In these works, Morphesis dramatically illuminates the heroic figure; there is a suggestion that the body is tensed in the position of a crucifixion, but the paintings only show hints of arms and legs. In Torso with Wound , the torso is presented not narratively but iconically, and is set against a dark and smoldering background.

One of the most impressive torso paintings from 1992, Pericles Gate [see Plate 3], is a triptych with torsos on the left and right. The central panel is a solid rectangle of gold leaf that has been obscured by dark smears of paint. Words are visible in this central panel: a quotation from Homer, in Greek, on the shortlives of heroic men. This painting is filled with paradoxes and tensions: between the glowing gold leaf and the dark obscuring paint, between the powerful, beautiful human figures depicted and the sense of pain and loss, between the Greek sense of tragedy and Unamuno's Christian understanding of “the tragic sense of life.”

In these recent torsos, we are presented with objects that are definitely physical but which appear to be transfigured. They glow as if they were on fire. In Torso with Wound , the chest reveals a diagonal cut that links this figure with the crucified Jesus, whose chest was pierced by a spear, and with the struggling Prometheus whose liver was eaten by an eagle. Religious traditions important to Greek culture overlap here, as do the foundations of Western culture. Most importantly, through these very physical but glowing torsos, humanity and divinity merge. Morphesis's art is, first and foremost, incarnational.

The smoother rendering of the torsos marked a new period of exploration for Jim Morphesis. Gone are the thick, sculptural constructions of the 1980s. In late 1993 and early 1994, Morphesis began to introduce landscape backgrounds into his work, beginning with his Revelations series. He has also reduced the scale in the current work. Revelations, No. 8 , for example [see Plate 5], is only 16 inches by 20 inches. In it, Morphesis has given us a diptych—the right side containing a male torso and the left side a skull. Both objects hover above a seascape with clouds set against a green sky. The expressive, gestural power of the applied paint has yielded to a more tightly rendered image in which the brush work is much less noticeable. A strange calm invests this work, perhaps achieved by the serene background seascape. The torso, while muscular, seems more youthful and placid than in earlier work, although a chest wound is still visible. The skull almost shines, and yet it is unsettling. Morphesis has exaggerated the sinus cavities above and below the eye sockets to such an extent that these openings suggest bullet holes. In this diptych the confidence of youth and the inevitability of mortality (perhaps violently realized) hovers above a beautiful, simple seascape, giving insight into life's beauty as well as its evanescence.

This work marks a surrealistic move by Morphesis, which is continued in a much more evident way in his most recent series, The Sacred Heart [see Plate 4]. This marks the furthest departure Morphesis has made from the torso and skull images of the 1980s. Like the Revelations series, these works are small (most are 16 inches by 10 inches) and are set against a landscape. Unlike the Revelations series, however, the landscapes of the most recent works are primordial and apocalyptic, featuring volcanoes and burning mountains. No human life is evident in the landscapes, and hovering above the landscapes are unusual, grotesque sacred hearts; they are at once symbolic and biologically accurate, ugly and yet, in a strange way, beautiful. The hearts are anthropomorphic and contain other aspects of human anatomy. What initially seems like another allusion to Christ's flesh being pierced by a spear can also be viewed as a closed eye crying tears of blood. Other forms suggest torsos, buttocks, figures kissing, and clenched fists. Each of the hearts bears its own very real and yet symbolic scars. The tormented land below resonates with the struggle, longing, and pain reflected in the hearts. Spilt blood becomes exaggerated as it is depicted as highly defined drops almost leaping from the heart, thus reminiscent of the blood spouting from the wounds of early Italian and Eastern Orthodox depictions of the crucified Jesus.

These current works mark a stylistic transition point in the artistic development of Jim Morphesis, yet they express concerns that have long been part of Morphesis's work. For the past two decades, Jim Morphesis has used compelling religious symbols and figures to express a journey of honesty, earnest inquiry, courage, compassion, and, ultimately, hope. In a recent interview, the artist observed: I've always had an interest in religious symbolism as a way of examining my beliefs and my understanding of the world as well as my place as an artist. I feel that what I have been doing is taking a religious symbol, tearing it apart (not out of disrespect but out of a need to explore) and putting it back together.

The hardest thing for a painter to come up with is something to paint, something to hang your paint on that you believe in enough so that you can work it. These religious images and shapes (and the power they contain) have afforded me this opportunity. Critic Neal Menzies, in commenting on Morphesis's Destiny and Chance Breeds Hope, offers a reflection that describes the essence of Jim Morphesis's art: Their bulk and inescapable presence serve to emphasize their triumph over crudeness and baseness in much the same way that their subject matter represents the triumph of salvation over damnation.

Issue #5• Spring 1994