Morris Louis was an American painter, who represented Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction movements. Together with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, he formed an art movement, that is known today as the Washington Color School.
Background
Morris Louis was born on November 28, 1912 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States to a middle-class Jewish family. His parents were Louis Bernstein and Cecelia Luckman Bernstein, who emigrated from Russia. His father was initially a factory worker, but later owned a small grocery store. Also, Louis had three brothers — Joseph, Aaron, both physicians, and the younger, Nathan, a pharmacist.
Education
In his early years, Morris attended several public schools in Baltimore. During the period from 1929 to 1933, he studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts (present-day Maryland Institute College of Art).
In 1933, Louis left Maryland Institute of Fine Arts before completing the program. After that, he worked at various odd jobs in Baltimore for several years, before moving to New York City in 1936. There, he met Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jack Tworkov. Since 1936 to 1940, Morris, like many artists during the Great Depression, worked in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project.
In 1940, he returned to his native Baltimore and continued to paint. Later, in 1947, he married Marcella Siegel and moved to the suburbs, where he taught art classes. During that time, Morris also painted abstract works, inspired by Joan Miró.
In 1948, Louis began using Magna paint, a type of acrylic paint, that was developed for him by his friends Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden. By 1950, Morris painted in abstract expressionist style, heavily influenced by Jackson Pollock. At that time, his works began to attain recognition among his contemporaries and were shown in several galleries.
In 1952, a pivotal year in his artistic career, Louis and his wife moved from the suburbs to Washington, D.C., and Louis began to teach at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts, where he met and became friends with Kenneth Noland. In April of 1953, the two artists traveled to New York City, where Noland introduced Louis to the influential critic Clement Greenberg, who henceforth would play a crucial role as supporter and guiding source of Louis' career. The same year, Noland and Louis visited Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio, where they saw and were greatly impressed by her stain paintings. Frankenthaler's painting inspired Noland and Louis to monumental changes in their art. Upon their return to Washington, Louis and Noland together experimented with various techniques of paint application. Also, in 1953, Louis held his first solo show at the Workshop Art Center in Washington, D.C.
Between 1954 and 1957, after his first Veil series, Louis returned to more gestural paintings, where color and line appear to attack the canvas in a manner, opposed to the serene use of color, associated with the Veils. Unhappy with his results, Louis destroyed nearly three hundred of paintings from these years (leaving less than ten) and in 1957, he returned to the technique, established with the Veils of 1954. He completed five distinct series of Veils during 1958 and the first part of 1959. In each series, Louis took his earlier interest in the staining of the canvas and developed it more consistently with his concern for line. Contrary to his Veils of 1954, most of these canvases are unprimed, causing the color to thoroughly saturate the canvas and create an illusion of inner space. Louis drew attention back to the reality of the canvas as an object by referring to the surface of the color field with a distinct linear pattern.
In the summer of 1960, Louis began his next great series of paintings, entitled the "Unfurleds". In these works, he continued to show a stronger interest in line by using individual stripes of color, that run down the unprimed horizontal canvas from the upper right corner toward the bottom center, leaving a large inverted triangular expanse of white in the center. The viewer is called upon to see both the pure color on either end and white triangle in the middle. The result is a remarkably coherent composition. In these canvases, Louis took advantage of an improved magna with a smoother consistency, allowing him to use his paints directly from the can. The undiluted paint produced purer hues and took on a new luminance.
The final series, created by Louis before his untimely death, was the "Stripes". Concentrating once again on the purity of color, Louis both poured and used a swab to move the paint down the canvas. Slightly overlapping stripes of colors, sometimes not at all, run vertically down the canvas, creating images of pure color, which in many ways prefigure the more static and controlled "hardedged" colors of Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly.
In July of 1962, Louis was diagnosed as having lung cancer, and as a result, his left lung was removed. The following months, he continued to plan for an exhibition in New York City, but he was unable to paint again.
Quotations:
"The more I paint the more I'm aware of a difference in my approach and others. Am distrustful of over-simplifications but nonetheless think that there is nothing very new in any period of art: what is true is that it is only something new for the painter and that this thin edge is what matters."