No one asked, but I am telling you: this painting is consuming my thoughts, both for my usual art nerd reasons and stucky reasons 👀
Morning by Morris Graves, 1933
Morris Graves was a well-known, early modern artist from the Pacific Northwest who gained national attention in the United States of America in the 1940s. Graves was a gay man and enjoyed a brief relationship with fellow Seattle-area artist Guy Anderson in the 1930s. When together, they moved between friends' and families' living spaces, occasionally inhabiting an abandoned house or two, barely getting by in lean times. Both of them artists, they struggled to pool together the money for paints and canvases, and resultingly ending up painting on burlap bags, paper, and various other non-traditional supports throughout this time.
The oil painting above, by Graves, Morning, from the '30s, is very contested in meaning.
A large swath of critics who have interpreted the painting make it out to be a moody, alienated work; the painting displays Graves himself in all his lanky, vulnerable youth experiencing aching isolation, struggling to find himself in the world as a gay man and an artist expected to make his own way in a suppressed economy. His turning from the viewer and in toward himself is perhaps symbolic of his more private personality, as he would later retreat from the national attention paid to his artworks. The application of paint is even transitional, applied thickly, and unlike his later mature style comprised of thinner, more delicate application of other mediums like tempera and ink.
However, some critics disagree.
Sheryl Conkelton, for example, writes:
"[This painting, Morning] which has been suggested to be a self-portrait, shows a lithe young man lying on a rumpled bed, shirtless, with pants pushed down around his hips, and one arm extended in a pose of modesty; with its title, Morning, it suggests the sensual laziness of the state of just waking. In fact, Graves later confided to his longtime companion, Robert Yarber, that it represented himself just after masturbation. The dreamy state and elongated, curved body again resonate with Symbolist ideas; Graves was clearly interested, in this and other paintings made around this time, in conveying not simply appearances but states of being.
... It is an intimate image also in terms of its paint: the palette is more or less true to its subject and the brushwork reinforces the forms. Instead of his earlier long, fluid strokes of color, here the brushstrokes are short and broken, with the edges of objects left blank or edged in white paint, which shows a clear affinity with Anderson's methods."
Excerpt from Pantheons of Dreams, Conkelton and Landau, Northwest Mythologies, 2003.
Both of these interpretations tempt me. I think both can be true at once. It might be that, consciously, Graves was inhabiting the lazy sprawl of existing just after masturbating first thing in the morning, warm with sleep, heart beating with haste but gradually slowing back to its resting rate. Meanwhile, unconsciously, he was swathed within the isolation and rejection of being queer at such a time, feeling the sting of being unable to fulfill the social role of masculinity in the professional sphere (unemployed due to the Depression) and in the domestic sphere (expected to settle down with a woman, which, he never married).
I love this painting on its own, of course, for those reasons. It's so complex and I really want to eat it, lmao.
But, also—
stucky 👏🏻 brain 👏🏻
This, to me, feels like Steve and Bucky.
This feels like an intimate, quiet capture of their mornings together during the economic low of the Depression. Just existing, together, in close quarters. All they have is each other, crashing in whoever's guest room or whoever's studio floor that will have them—thin mattresses, hard floors, sagging couches, battered brushes, burlap bags, and medium-diluted oil paint, trying to stretch the precious pigments as far as they will go.
This feels like a blushing, just-woken, morning portrait of Steve. Lanky and shy, pained and tender, and yet... sensuous and teasing.
Simultaneously, I get the feeling that the man in Morning could lift his head, confronting viewers either with raw tears in his eyes or with a frisky smirk on his mouth, and it makes me lean in. I want to know—to find out via investigating each stroke of paint and detail of composition.
