Imust admit that until I visited the exhibition “Suzy Frelinghuysen and George L. K. Morris, American Abstract Artists,” I had seen relatively little work by either of the husband and wife team who are the show’s protagonists.¹ Morris (1905-75), I knew, was one of those affluent, sophisticated, well-traveled Americans—like his contemporary Lincoln Kirstein—who served as missionaries for Modernism at a time when most of their countrymen were wondering whether that newfangled European stuff really was art at all. I knew, too, that like Kirstein, Morris was an admirer of Gaston Lachaise and—again like Kirstein—had his portrait done by the expatriate French sculptor. (Even more impressive, Morris owned Lachaise’s monumental reclining nude La Montagne, still in the Massachusetts woods where the artist and his patron sited it in 1935.) I had a less clear image of Frelinghuysen (1911-88); I knew of her only as Morris’s wife and as a painter.

Unlike Kirstein, who functioned as a sort of éminence grise in the American vanguard, Morris and Frelinghuysen were active participants. Morris was a frequent contributor of perceptive articles about Modernist art to Partisan Review in its early days (he was also a patron of the magazine), a founding member of American Abstract Artists, and, with Frelinghuysen, a regular in the group’s exhibitions. The association was dedicated to a geometric art so high-minded that Mondrian himself agreed to join in 1940 when he moved to the U.S.: a cool, idealized abstraction that was the antithesis of