MORRIS GRAVES
 JOYOUS YOUNG PINE
(LONESOME PINE)
1944
Tempera on textured Chinese paper affixed to canvas
53.25 x 26.75 inches

$80,000.

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There are a number of things to relate about this work. It's unusual for its size and color but wholly within his range of work, though he rarely worked larger than this. The colors are bright and good. It does not appear faded in any way. He made a great series of pine tree pieces under different titles; often "Joyous."

Graves often laminated his paper to canvas as he fancied himself as having picked up quite a few Japanese screen making techniques.

The paper is mounted to a larger sheet of canvas that holds on its back side some very bright fuschia pink washes of color. He did this "blushing" technique sometimes knowing that by painting the back side of a sheet of canvas or paper, some of the color blushes through. This one has that watery passage with white, green and blue wavy strokes held within the tree's vermilion and brown branches.
Maybe an expression of water, sound, or rhythm. This is an interesting phenomenon in his work in the expression of sound or noise or music. The SF MOMA has a famous painting titled "The Sound of Machinery in the Air" which is about the sound vibrations that annoyed him during WWII when Boeing aircraft flew over his studio.

This work was originally in the collection of Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton and was sold following his death in 1962. This made for an historic "first ever auction" of a living artist's work devoted to a single sale catalog at Sotheby's in 1966. It's been reproduced in a number of touring exhibition catalogs, including one titled "Morris Graves" at the San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1948 on page 16. This work was auctioned at that time under the name "Joyous Young Pine" and it appears to be known by that name as well as "Lonesome Pine."

- Greg Kucera