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Philip Morsberger’s Autobiographical Notes
By Wim Roefs
The one head looking up at the viewer from the
bottom-left corner of Philip Morsberger’s 2014 painting La Paloma is the only presence of the human figure in the artist’s
current exhibition. The rest of the show is mostly without the cartoon-like
figures, animals and objects that have dominated much of Morsberger’s work of
the past three decades. Instead, the work is defined visually by names, words
and phrases written with vigorous, energetic and joyful marks and the riotous
color compositions that embrace them. While the human presence is no less
evident here than in Morsberger’s other works, aside from that one head and the
odd object, the scribbles are the only representational element in the paintings.
The exhibition is representative of Morsberger’s
output for 2013 – 2014. While the extended near-absence of figures, animals and
object is a new development, the paintings are less of a departure than they
might seem. They fit Morsberger’s larger body of work fairly effortlessly, as
the illustrations with this essay suggest. Morsberger often before has included
words and phrases in his representational work, at times the same ones as in
the recent paintings. He also has created non-figurative, essentially abstract-expressionist
paintings, both with and without scribbles. And he has superimposed figures and
objects on compositions that, like the current work, are strongly defined by their
abstracted, expressionist nature and brushwork.
No
less important, the recent paintings share the strong autobiographical element
of Morsberger’s figurative work. In the latter, Morsberger encountered his
hat-wearing father; his mother; his brother fancying himself Tailspin Tommy;
cartoon characters; toy cars and airplanes; and goldfish and turtles, the only
pets his father allowed him and his brother to have. He also inserts himself in
different ways and stages of life.
About
those paintings, Susan Landauer wrote in the catalogue for the 2000 exhibtion The Lighter Side of Bay Area Figuration:
“One of Morsberger’s recurrent alter egos is the character he affectionately
calls the ‘Cosmic Scribbler’.” The scribbler “can usually be seen furiously
recording the anarchic activity around him or else galloping his way through
the ‘rat race’ of the art world.”
In the recent paintings, the scribbler scribbles
his biography into the work. Morsberger’s lifelong love for comic books is
evident, for instance, in phrases such as “notary sojac,” from the Smokey
Stover comic strip, or “nov shamoz kapop,” from Room And Board, another cartoon.
Even though he suspects the phrases were nonsensical, they suggested meaning
and seemed important, Morsberger says.
The
names in Roll Call, on this catalogue’s
cover, present friends from his youth, boys and girls. Pot Pourri also lists people he knew, including one “Aldrich,” who
furthermore refers to a beloved radio and TV series, Henry Aldrich. “Cecilia”
shows up as someone from Morsberger’s past but also as St. Cecilia (p. 7),
patroness of musicians – Morsberger is an avid piano player. “Paloma suave en
la fuente,” written in La Paloma (p.
6), is from the 19th-century Spanish habaneras song by the same name. “Fiddle Dee Dee” refers to
Scarlett in Gone With The Wind but also
to Morsberger’s not unanimously appreciated response to the goings on in a
meeting at Oxford University. He taught there at St. Edmund Hall (p. 11) as the
Ruskin Master of Drawing in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Charm City refers to a nickname for Morsberger’s
hometown, Baltimore. “Catoctin,” in Maryland
Fantasy (p. 6), is the mountain range straddling Maryland, his native
state, and Virginia. The area includes Cunningham Falls (p. 10). In the 1940s, working
in a camp for crippled children in the Catoctin Mountains, Morsberger would
play one of his favorite pieces of music, Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso, the title of and writing in yet another work (p.
7).
“So
there,” Morsberger says after reluctantly explaining the meaning of words and phrases
in several paintings. “All of the terms are an excuse to move lines and colors
around. It’s very much stream of consciousness.” With approval, he refers to Mattise’s
quote that painters ought to have their tongues cut out because their decision
to become a painter takes away their right to express themselves with anything
but a brush. “The writing is not meant to be mysterious in any way,” Morsberger
says. “I am not trying to confound the viewer. I want the viewer to be a
participant just as me, and I take it as an act of fate that people will bring
their own insights as to what the paintings are trying to be and offer.”
During
his early-1950s undergraduate studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology
in Pittsburgh, now Carnegie Mellon University, Morsberger didn’t care much for
the Abstract Expressionism that dominated the art world. He took his cues more
from Bay Area Figuration painters such as Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn
and Nathan Oliveira. The academic training he received courtesy of the GI Bill at
Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing later that decade was more his speed.
In the 1960s, Morsberger was a
committed figurative realist with a modern flair, dealing with JFK’s
assassination, civil rights and other political issues. But a 1972 painting about the My Lai
Massacre stopped him cold. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” he said in 2009.
Slashing paint all over the work, Morsberger discovered his inner abstract
expressionist after all and turned to expressive, abstracted landscapes, such as Cornish
Fantasy (p. 4).
But
he missed the figure, which returned in the early 1980s, after his father’s
death, as figures from his youth rather than the contemporaries Morsberger
dealt with in the 1960s. In the early 1980s, he briefly painted rather exact,
regimented scenes with a multitude of strongly delineated figures, deciding on
what color to use for which parts by throwing dice. Around 1982, he arrived at
the cartoon-like characters painted with a sure, painterly, draftsman-like
brush that came to define much of his career. They were, as Mark Van Proyen
wrote in 1993, “billowing improvisations of phosphorescent color oscillating in
the shallow field along with cartoon faces that suggest images of Ross Perot
drawn by Gasoline Alley cartoonist Frank King.”
In
his 2007 book Phillip Morsberger: A
Passion for Painting, British author Christopher Lloyd observed that the paintings
“adumbrate universal truths about life and death through a sequence of personal
references.” Morsberger himself says: “All these paintings are on their face
comedic, but they are a little bit like whistling in the cemetery. They are
about life, death and resurrection.”
Why
did he step away from figuration? “I am not sure I know the answer,” Morsberger
says. “I suppose I was feeling I was repeating myself, running the risk of
becoming formulaic, so I went out to the edge of the branch, as it were, making
marks just for a while and in the process enjoying the color interplay. But
also inserting words that in one way or another had some meaning for me. Childhood
nostalgia things. Words that aroused me to write them and embellish them and then
using them as a springboard for composition. And from there, one is just
hanging onto the brush for dear life.”
“I’ve
been enjoying the voyage so far. Where it will take me, I can only imagine. As I
said, hanging onto the brush for dear life. Whether the figures will come back,
I don’t know, but it easily could happen. But for now I am perfectly happy with
my words, and strokes and color interactions. If I knew what I was doing, I
could quit. But I don’t, so I can’t.”
March 2015
Wim Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery
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