ART & ARTISTS: 2012-04-01

This is part 2 of a 2-part post on the works of American painter Morris Louis (1912 – 1962). Louis was one of the earliest exponents of Colour Field painting. Living in Washington, D.C., Louis along with Kenneth Noland and other painters formed what is known today as The Washington Colour School. For biographical notes on Morris Louis and further works, see part 1.

All works © The Estate of Morris Louis

1960 Alpha-Pi
magna acrylic on canvas 260.4 x 449.6 cm

1960 Beta Nu
magna acrylic on canvas 259.1 x 701 cm

1960 Beta Upsilon
magna acrylic on canvas 260.4 x 618.5 cm

1960 Delta Kappa
magna acrylic on canvas 262.9 x 370.8 cm

1960 Delta Zeta
magna acrylic on canvas 257.8 x 362.6 cm

1960 Gamma Omnicron
magna acrylic on canvas 259.1 x 395 cm

1960 Gamma Tau
magna acrylic on canvas 261 x 422.9 cm

1960 Pi
magna acrylic on canvas 261.6 x 444.5 cm

1960 Untitled
magna acrylic on canvas 264.2 x 307.3 cm

1960 Untitled
magna acrylic on canvas 266.7 x 513.1 cm

1960 Vav
magna acrylic on canvas 260.3 x 359.4 cm

1960 Where
magna acrylic on canvas 252.3 x 361.9 cm

1960 While series II
magna on canvas

1960-1 Phi
magna acrylic on canvas 265 x 362 cm

1960-61 Alpha Tau
magna acrylic on canvas

1961 Alpha-Phi
magna acrylic on canvas 259.1 x 459.7 cm

1961 Claustral
magna acrylic on canvas

1961 Color Line
magna acrylic on canvas 215.2 x 124.8 cm

1961 Delta Theta
magna acrylic on canvas 261 x 416.6 cm

1961 Number 28
magna acrylic on canvas 91 x 78 in

1961 Pillar of Delay
magna acrylic on canvas 220.3 x 100.3 cm

1961 Pungent Distances
magna acrylic on canvas 231.8 x 150.5 cm

1961 Theta
magna acrylic on canvas 259 x 426.7 cm

1962 Approach
magna acrylic on canvas 83 ¼ x 28 in

1962 Horizontal VIII
magna acrylic on canvas 65.5 x 243 cm

1962 Hot Half
magna acrylic on canvas

In 1973 Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein painted a tribute to Morris Louis' work:

1973 Roy Lichtenstein Untitled (Morris Louis Unfurled)

This is part 1 of a 2-part post on the works of American painter Morris Louis (1912 – 1962). Louis was one of the earliest exponents of Colour Field painting. Living in Washington, D.C., Louis along with Kenneth Noland and other painters formed what is known today as The Washington Colour School.

He was born Morris Louis Bernstein in 1912 in Baltimore. From 1929 to 1933, he studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts on a scholarship, but left shortly before completing the course. He worked at various odd jobs to support himself whilst painting and in 1935 served as president of the Baltimore Artists’ Association. From 1936 to 1940 Louis lived in New York where he worked in the easel division of the WPA Federal Art Project. During this period, he knew Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jack Tworkov. He also dropped his last name.

He returned to Baltimore in 1940 and taught privately. In 1948 he started to use Magna acrylic paints. In 1952 he moved to Washington, D.C. There, he taught at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts and met fellow instructor Kenneth Noland (see my blog post on Noland July 2011) who became a close friend. Louis’s first solo show took place at the Workshop Center Art Gallery in 1953.

In 1953, he and Noland visited Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio, where they saw and were greatly impressed by her stain painting Mountains and Sea (1952) (see my blog post on Frankenthaler July 2011).

Helen Frankenthaler: Mountains and Sea 1952

On their return to Washington, Louis and Noland together experimented with various techniques of paint application. In 1954, Louis produced his mature Veil paintings, which were characterized by overlapping, superimposed layers of transparent colour poured onto and stained into sized or un-sized canvas. Here's a later painting showing the scale:

1959 Seal
magna acrylic on canvas 257.8 x 358.1 cm

Louis’s first solo show in New York was held at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1957. He destroyed many of the paintings in this show but 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 colour flow from both sides of large white fields—and the Stripe paintings (1961–62). Louis died in Washington, D.C., in 1962. 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.

All works © The Estate of Morris Louis