Morris Louis

Morris Louis, Where, 252 x 362 cm. magna on canvas, 1960, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Morris Louis
Born	November 28, 1912(1912-11-28)
Died	September 7, 1962(1962-09-07) (aged 49) Washington, DC.
Nationality	American
Field	Painting
Training	Maryland Institute College of Art
Movement	Color Field painting, Abstract Expressionism, Post-painterly abstraction, Washington Color School
Works	in museums: Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Influenced by	Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock

Morris Louis (born Morris Louis Bernstein, 28 November 1912 – 7 September 1962) was an American abstract expressionist painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. Living in Washington, DC. Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.

Early life

From 1929 to 1933, he studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts (now Maryland Institute College of Art) on a scholarship, but left shortly before completing the program. Louis worked at various odd jobs to support himself while painting and in 1935 was president of the Baltimore Artists’ Association. From 1936 to 1940, he lived in New York and worked in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. During this period, he knew Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jack Tworkov. He also dropped his last name.

Color Field painting

He returned to his native Baltimore in 1940 and taught privately. In 1948, he pioneered the use of Magna paint - a newly developed oil based acrylic paint made for him by his friends, New York City paintmakers Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden. In 1952, Louis moved to Washington, DC.. Living in Washington, D.C., he was somewhat apart from the New York scene and he was working almost in isolation. During the 1950s he and a group of artists that included Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Tom Downing, Howard Mehring and Anne Truitt, among others were central to the development of Color Field painting. The basic point about Louis's work and that of other Color Field painters, sometimes known as the Washington Color School in contrast to most of the other new approaches of the late 1950s and early 1960s, is that they greatly simplified the idea of what constitutes the look of a finished painting. They continued in a tradition of painting exemplified by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Ad Reinhardt. Eliminating gestural, compositional drawing in favor of large areas of raw canvas, solid planes of thinned and fluid paint, utilizing an expressive and psychological use of flat, and intense color and allover, repetitive composition. One of Louis's most important series of Color Field paintings were his Unfurleds.^[1]

Stain painting

All of these artists were concerned with the classic problems of pictorial space and the flatness of the picture plane. In 1953, Louis and Noland visited Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio, where they saw and were greatly impressed by her stain paintings especially Mountains and Sea (1952). Upon their return to Washington, Louis and Noland together experimented with various techniques of paint application. Louis characteristically applied extremely diluted, thinned paint to an unprimed, unstretched canvas, allowing it to flow over the inclined surface in effects sometimes suggestive of translucent color veils. The importance of Frankenthaler's example in Louis's development of this technique has been noted.^[1] However, even more so than Frankenthaler, Louis eliminated the brush gesture, although his flat, thin pigment is at times modulated in billowing and subtle tones. His Veil Paintings consist of waves of brilliant, curving color-shapes submerged in translucent washes through which separate colors emerge principally at the edges. Although subdued, the resulting color is immensely rich. In another series, the artist used long parallel bands and stripes of pure color arranged side by side in rainbow effects.

Late paintings

Louis destroyed many of his paintings between 1955 and 1957. He resumed work on the Veils in 1958–59. These were followed by Florals and Columns (1960), Unfurleds (1960–61)—in which rivulets of more opaque, intense color flow from both sides of large white fields of raw canvas—and finally the Stripe paintings (1961–62).

Personal life

He married Marcella Siegel in 1947.^[2][3]

Death

Morris Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1962 and soon after, died at his home in Washington, D.C., on September 7, 1962. The cause of his illness was attributed to prolonged exposure to paint vapours.^[2] A memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1963. Major Louis exhibitions were also organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1967 and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1976. In 1986 there was an important retrospective exhibition of his works at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. During 2007-2008 an important retrospective was held by museums in San Diego, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Atlanta at the High Museum, and in Washington, DC. at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

See also

• Color field painting
• Washington Color School
• Post-painterly abstraction
• Magna paint

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Fenton, Terry. "Morris Louis". sharecom.ca. Retrieved December 8, 2008
2. ^ ^{a b} Morris Louis bio, http://www.theartstory.org/artist-louis-morris.htm
3. ^ "Morris Louis" bio, http://www.artscenecal.com/ArtistsFiles/LouisM/LouisMFile/MLouisBio.html

Sources

• Greenberg, Clement. Late Writings, edited by Robert C. Morgan, St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
• The Columbia Encyclopedia
• Kleiner, Fred S.; and Mamiya, Christin J., Gardner's Art Through the Ages (2004). Volume II. Wadsworth Publishing. ISBN 0-534-64091-5.
• Schwabsky, Barry. "Irreplaceable Hue - Color Field Painting." Art Forum 1994. Look Smart 20 April 2007.
• Color As Field:American Painting, 1950-1975., retrieved December 7, 2008
• Wilkin, Karen and Belz, Carl. Color As Field:American Painting, 1950-1975. Published: Yale University Press; 1 edition (November 29, 2007). ISBN 0-300-12023-0, ISBN 978-0-300-12023-3
• De Antonio, Emile and Tuchman, Mitchell. Painters Painting A Candid History of The Modern Art Scene, 1940–1970, Abbeville Press 1984, ISBN 0-89659-418-1
• Various authors: Barbara Rose, Gerald Nordland, Walter Hopps, Hardy S. George; Breaking the Mold, Selections from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, 1961–1968, exhibition catalogue, Oklahoma City Museum of Art 2007, ISBN 0-911919-05-8
• Carmean, E.A. Toward Color and Field, Exhibition Catalogue, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 1971.
• Carmean, E.A. Helen Frankenthaler A Paintings Retrospective, Exhibition Catalog, Harry N. Abrams in conjunction with The Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, ISBN 0-8109-1179-5
• Henning, Edward B. Color & Field, Art International May 1971: 46-50.
• Tucker, Marcia. The Structure of Color, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, 1971.
• Michael Fried. Morris Louis, Harry N. Abrams, Library of Congress Number: 79-82872

External links

• MoMA Collection Page
• Tate Collection Page
• 2007 Retrospective
• “Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited”, September 20, 2007 to January 6, 2008
• Morris Louis - Artist Overview on The Art Story Foundation

Persondata
Name	Louis, Morris
Alternative names
Short description	Second generation Abstract Expressionist, pioneer of Color Field painting
Date of birth	November 28, 1912
Place of birth	Baltimore, MD.
Date of death	September 7, 1962
Place of death	Washington, DC.