Just how abstract was George Morrison?

It’s subtitled ‘George Morrison’s New York’, but the paintings in this brief survey at The Met – 35 works in total – draw on two distinct landscapes. There’s the broadway boogie-woogie of the Manhattan grid, but also the landlocked horizon of the Great Lakes. The weight is on one side; certainly, the largest and most prominent canvases – the rhythmically stroked miasma of The Red Painting (1956); the crackling cerulean, salmon and gold verticals of The Antagonist, from the same year; or the sooty grey and ochre holding up a bloody dusk in The Red Sky (1955) – speak to life in the Big Apple. But the heat is on the other. Two of the most striking and prickly pieces on view are from Morrison’s Horizon series, painted on the shore of Lake Superior in the 1980s, long after the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. The small panel titled Autumn Dusk, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape, from 1986, feels especially charged. The horizon constrains an iridescent sky, made by layering warm purples and greys, and the lakeshore of green and red-brown mud, while the water itself is a slender navy jab.

Morrison is known, and billed, as an innovative abstract painter, but you’ll come away from this show questioning just how nonfigurative his work is. More than many of his contemporaries, who verged on minimalism or pursued all-over compositions, Morrison’s New York abstractions carry jostling echoes of shadowy urban canyons, jagged industrial districts, and expansive waterfronts. His feet stayed on the ground. One horizontal canvas, 1952’s Structural Landscape (Highway), sends up black and off-white riffs between mottled grass green chunks. Even in canvases where Morrison seems to be playing with pure colour and/or form, such as 1965’s White Painting, the swirls and quadrilaterals feel slotted in, like a translucent puzzle made from thick impasto. The underpainting ekes through, a premonition of the stippled, layered effect of the skies in the Horizon works.

Morrison is likely alone among the men debating aesthetics at the Cedar Tavern – with names like Kline, Pollock, and Rothko – in being a member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. To its credit, the show doesn’t harp on this fact. There’s a bit of biography in the wall texts, conveying the general mid-century heroic bohemian force that would compel a young man to leave a reservation in Minnesota and enrol in the Art Students League in 1943. There’s a mildly cheesy display of a paint-covered easel, stool, and school lockers (not Morrison’s) from that era to set the tone. The opposite title wall shows off a few early sketchbooks. Morrison was precocious, and New York was the place to be.

And not just for art. Morrison painted while modern jazz bloomed, taking on subtler, simmering modal forms. You can’t separate painting’s experiments in improvisation from its contemporary freeform music. To make sure you get the point, the show comes drizzled in a cool jazz soundtrack, including Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue from 1959, basically the most famous jazz album ever made. The effect is nonspecific. Rather than enhancing Morrison’s work, such masterpieces outmanoeuvre it, threatening to shrink the canvases in front of you to album covers. Coincidentally or not, the concurrent Jack Whitten retrospective at MoMA also pipes bop into the galleries – including Kind of Blue. That exhibition makes a similar effort to evoke nostalgia for a time and place, with paint-spattered tools and photographs of loft studios. At MoMA, though, we’re told the soundtrack is drawn from LPs in Whitten’s collection – the connection feels more organic – and Whitten’s work, frankly, looks more like he was smoking what Miles smoked.

Better to stick with what makes Morrison special: his observational streak. Fisherman with Nets (1945), placed near the show’s entrance, already seems packed with the concepts Morrison would explore for the rest of his career. There’s the omnipresent sea, of course, and his interest in its edges, but most of all an attention to physical rhythm and rhyme. The way the fisherman shakes out the cat’s cradle of his tackle creates parabolic eyelets and skeins every bit as dynamic as the curlicues in Morrison’s later work. His paintings would stay anchored to the world.