Morris Graves

The long-awaited Morris Graves: His Houses, His Gardens tells the story of the homes of Morris Graves, a leading figure in Northwest Art and one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century.

This high-quality book with beautiful duotone photographs concerns itself with four locations—The Rock, Careläden, Woodtown Manor, and The Lake. Author, photographer, and close Graves friend Richard Svare makes clear that the world Morris Graves inhabited physically was the world he experienced transcendentally.

Morris Graves soared from obscurity to fame in 1942, when thirty of his works appeared in New York's Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "Americans 1942: 18 Artists from Nine States." A review in ARTnews magazine praised his paintings as the "sensation of the show."

As a charismatic figure who traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia, Graves developed friendships with artists like John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and hobnobbed with celebrities and royalty. Throughout his career, Graves's work is represented in many public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum, Washington's Phillips Collection, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Partly because he chose to live in the Northwest, Graves was often said to be reclusive. Many of his early paintings were created at "The Rock," a cabin he built for himself eighty-five miles north of Seattle. He built a home in Ireland and spent the last thirty-five years of his life in Northern California.

RICHARD SVARE, born in 1930, studied classical voice in his youth. He met Morris Graves
in the early 1950s and subsequently shared homes with Graves during the period of
Careläden and Woodtown Manor. In the late 1960s, Svare moved to Stockholm, Sweden
where he founded and directed the Scandinavian Theatre Company. In 1969 he moved to
Corfu,Greece and cofounded the Corfu International Festival with Maestro Schippers. In
1976, he returned to the United States and worked as administrator for the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company in New York City. In 1979 he returned to Athens, where he became a resident
of Greece and over the next two decades became a well-known actor, appearing in feature
roles for Greek, British, French, and American film and television productions. In 1995 he
returned to Seattle, Washington to work on his writing. Richard Svare died in 2004.