I R T

Morris had a privileged upbringing during which he was trained in music, fine art and literature. He studied at Groton, Yale, and at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1925 he traveled abroad and worked in Paris with the French modernist, Fernand Léger. Morris’s experience in Europe with avant-garde painting, sculpture and literature inspired his devotion to abstraction. Like fellow artist and collector, Albert Gallatin, Morris became one of the most active promoters of modernism in America. In 1936, he co-founded the American Abstract Artists, an association that challenged the ascendancy of realist American scene painting. Throughout his life he was a prolific writer and painter and a passionate defender of abstraction in the United States. IRT is a major example of Morris’s transformation of urban architectural space through the careful manipulation of Cubist form. Like his contemporaries, such as Stuart Davis, Morris used this aesthetic to explore American imagery—in this case, the chaotic rush of a New York subway. He suggested the experience of commuting in the busy metropolis through repeated details such as tiles, handles, upright poles, electric wires, train numbers and destination signs. The grand scale and expanding space combine to conjure a lively environment rushing with perpetual motion.