Morris Louis

Morris Louis (1912-1962), American abstract painter, the main pioneer of color-stain, or color-field, painting. He was born Morris Louis Bernstein in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied painting at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts in Baltimore from 1929 to 1933. Louis originally worked in a late cubist manner, but after visiting the studio of Helen Frankenthaler in 1953, he was heavily influenced by her method of painting without brushes—by staining raw canvas with poured acrylic paint. His Veil series (1954 and 1957-1960) uses thin washes of paint to create translucent curtains of color on the canvas; one example from this series is Tet (1958, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City). In the summer of 1959 Louis began a number of experiments with this painting technique. In the series Florals, he used heavier paint in more haphazard bursts in Alephs, areas of pigment radiate out from the center. In Columns,Omegas, and Japanese Banners, large portions of the canvases remain unstained. These experiments resulted in the Unfurled series (1960-1961), in which thin brilliant streams of color flow across the lower corners of otherwise empty canvases, as in Beta Upsilon (1960, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.). In his next series, the Stripe series (1961-1962), colored bands are juxtaposed vertically or horizontally; one example is Third Element (1962, Museum of Modern Art, New York).