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Lot Essay
The Bird stands as a rare example of Cedric Morris’ interest in both abstraction and surrealism, painted when he was living in Paris during the early 1920s. At the time, the French capital was at the forefront of artistic innovation. Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines could be found socialising with the early pioneers of surrealism: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Peggy Guggenheim. Inscribed in the textured background, Morris frames the scene with Espérance and Amitié, Hope and Friendship, that perhaps signals the light, experimental mood circulating in Paris at the time. Seemingly inspired by the likes of Picasso, the work includes a number of elements found in a Parisian café. The scene captures an interaction between a man and woman enjoying glasses of crème de menthe and playing a game of billiards (a label on the reverse, written by Lett-Haines, gives the alternative title Crème de Menthe). Recalling early surrealist interest in dream and imagination, Morris wrote: ‘if I paint a bird … you accuse me of not being real and find imagination at fault? It is my vision and real to me. Realism is not Reality’ (the artist quoted in Richard Morphet, Cedric Morris, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate, 1984, p. 29).
The Bird stayed in the artist’s collection as an example of his early surrealist work, lending the painting to the National Museum of Wales for his major retrospective exhibition in 1968. The painting was similarly held in esteem by those around him; it was passed to the artist Joan O’Malley by 1984. Painting under her maiden name Joan Warburton, the previous owner of the work studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing under Morris. The artist’s influence on Warburton, undoubtedly continued through the acquisition of his early work, had a strong effect on her paintings which retain a slight dream-like quality. A wonderfully fresh example of Morris’s early experimental compositions, one can see the delight the artist took in capturing his Parisian subject matter with imagination and flourish.
The Bird stayed in the artist’s collection as an example of his early surrealist work, lending the painting to the National Museum of Wales for his major retrospective exhibition in 1968. The painting was similarly held in esteem by those around him; it was passed to the artist Joan O’Malley by 1984. Painting under her maiden name Joan Warburton, the previous owner of the work studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing under Morris. The artist’s influence on Warburton, undoubtedly continued through the acquisition of his early work, had a strong effect on her paintings which retain a slight dream-like quality. A wonderfully fresh example of Morris’s early experimental compositions, one can see the delight the artist took in capturing his Parisian subject matter with imagination and flourish.