Morris Louis
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| Morris Louis | |
| Born | November 28, 1912 |
| Died | September 7, 1962 (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: |
| Influenced by | Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock |
Morris Louis (Morris Louis Bernstein) (November 28, 1912 - September 7, 1962) is a United States abstract expressionist painter, one of the many such painters to emerge in the 1950s. 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. He 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.
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[edit] Color Field Painting
He returned to his native Baltimore in 1940 and taught privately. In 1948, he started to use Magna - oil based acrylic paints. In 1952, Louis moved to Washington, D.C. Living in Washington, D.C., somewhat apart from the New York scene and working almost in isolation. He and a group of artists that included Kenneth Noland 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 painting's were his Unfurleds as Alpha-Pi 1960, as seen above depicts.
[edit] 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. 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.
[edit] Late Paintings & Untimely Death
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).
Morris Louis died of lung cancer in Washington, D.C., on September 7, 1962 at the age of 49. 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 Collection of Fine Arts, 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.
