Philip Morsberger: 2020

Augusta, Ga., artists Philip Morsberger and Anita Huffington will present oil pastel drawings and bronze and stone sculptures respectively at if ART Gallery’s first exhibition of 2020. The 85-year-old Huffington, who studied dance with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, came out of the 1950s New York City art scene as a sculptor. Morsberger, 86, is the former Ruskin Master of Drawing at Britain’s Oxford University and among the United States’ most prominent figurative painters of the past decades.

The exhibition will run from January 25 – February 15, 2020, and will open with a reception on Saturday, January 25, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. Morsberger’s figurative and abstract oil pastel drawings are from 2019. They are a selection from his massive recent output of drawings. Huffington will present classical-inspired bronze, wood and sandstone figurative sculptures from the 1994 – 2009 period.

Baltimore native and Augusta, Ga., resident Morsberger (b. 1933) is among the Southeast’s most prominent painters. In the mid-1950s, he studied at Oxford University, where from 1971-1984 he was the university’s Ruskin Master of Drawing. He used the prestigious position to develop and head the now renowned, full-blown art department at the university. In the United States, Morsberger has taught at Harvard University; Dartmouth College; the University of California, Berkeley; Miami University in Ohio; and the California College of Arts and Crafts, now the California College of Arts, in San Francisco. He retired from teaching after a five-year stint as artist in residence at Augusta State University, now Augusta University.

Morsberger’s work is in many museums, including Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and the South Hampton City Art Gallery in England; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art and Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum in California; the Morris Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Atlanta in Georgia; the Columbus Museum of Art and Youngstown’s Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio; the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery in New York state; Dartmouth’s Hood Museum in New Hampshire; and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe.

Morsberger was the subject of the 2007 book Philip Morsberger: A Passion for Painting by Christopher Lloyd. He and his work also were the topic of or included in numerous other books and catalogues, including Susan Landauer’s The Lighter Side of Bay Area Figuration(2000), J. Richard Gruber’sPhilip Morsberger: Paintings and Drawings from the Sixties(2000) and Marcia Tanner’s Philip Morsberger(1992).

Huffington (b. 1934), also a Baltimore native, has been exhibiting her sculptures continuously since the mid-1970s. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Arkansas Art Center, the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, also in Arkansas, and other public collections. She has shown at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Georgia’s Columbus Museum of Art and other museums, galleries and art centers. The book Anita Huffington, with photos by David Finn, was published in 2007.

Studying with Graham and Cunningham, Huffington was part of the New York City art scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she hung with painters such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Philip Guston. Relationships such as those set her on the path of expressing her feelings for movement and life not through dance but through sculpture. She earned a BFA and MFA from City College in New York. In the mid-1970s, Huffington moved with her late husband to Arkansas’s Ozark Mountains to exchange city life for nature. Living in a log cabin surrounded by nature had an impact on Huffington’s work, which at times took on the characteristics of trees, wind, rock and soil. Half a decade ago, Huffington moved to Augusta.

In addition to the influences of the New York scene, author Nancy Princenthal related Huffington’s work to earlier modernists, including the paintings by Amedeo Modigliani and sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi. Pulitzer Prize winning art critic Holland Cotter referred to “the sense of mystery hiding under the ordinary” in Huffington’s work. “These bronze and stone sculptures are based on ancient Greek marbles,” Cotter wrote, “but look as if their surfaces were dissolving to reveal tender archaic spirits lying within the classical ideal.”