I often think of Morris Louis and his short, brilliant
career. A man who was old enough to have known many of the Abstract
Expressionists – those heroic Americans who forged a new expression in
opposition to the hegemony of European art (especially Picasso) – and a man who knew something about color, enough
to make some of the most startlingly beautiful large-scale paintings of the 20th Century.
Morris Louis was a humble teacher of art, but part of an
ambitious circle of painters, including Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons and Jules
Olitski, who were committed to a new vision of formal painting someone dubbed
the Color Field School. Lyrical Abstraction was another name used at the time. The
names, no matter their origin, are appropriate
because these men were able to make art from the simple notion that
color is best experienced as a sensation that fills the vision and the mind
with sensory experience. Sometimes this experience is both memorable and
mystical. The latter is controversial, as anything that refers to Spirit and
Modernism in the same breath must be. That aside, to witness the Spirit at work
one needs only to direct one’s eyes to the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko
and Morris Louis (and a few others). Their content, beyond the merely descriptive, was unspoken - or secret - (their titles
are notoriously unhelpful). No matter, all three managed to achieve an unmistakable sense
of awe through the scale of their paintings and their very obvious simplicity.
Louis had two periods: the Veils and the Unfurleds. The example I reproduce here comes from the
Veils, because I happen to think these are the most arresting. It’s important
to remember that each of Louis’s paintings is immersive (by which I mean that
when viewers are within a few feet of the canvas, they feel immersed in the
experience, the effect due probably to the approximately 10 to 15 feet wide
by 9 or 10 feet high size canvases the artist produced. They were made by letting the
paint flow in carefully planned directions, probably by lifting and tilting the
canvas as the wet paint flowed down over it., The paint had been carefully diluted to be
transparent and liquid, making the painted surface entirely flat, a goal of the
painting aesthetic of the day.
These works sometimes suggest to me flowers of many colors blossoming
from their buds; and, other times, Salome’s veils as she danced for Herod; and,
other times, the muscularity of a force of nature.
Louis died of lung cancer in 1962 at the age of 49, likely
due to inhaling the fumes from Magna, an oil-based acrylic auto body paint,
that had been custom prepared for him by Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden. Like
Pollock, he worked standing over his canvases which he had affixed to stretchers to permit movement. And like Helen Frankenthaler, he developed and refined his own method of
using paint as a staining medium., with no surface texture. His paintings have
been collected by museums and individuals with great enthusiasm since his death,
and now they are in public and private collections all over the world.
Louis is one of several little known master painters of the late
Abstract Expressionist period. He should probably be accorded the title “painter’s
painter”, because, although he is not widely appreciated by the general public,
he is very much admired among artists. This post was prompted by a visit to the
Seattle Art Museum, which recently hung its Unfurled.
