Morris Louis Bernstein, known professionally as Morris Louis, was born on November 28, 1912 in Baltimore, Maryland. One of the leading figures of the Color Field movement and a founding member of the Washington Color School movement of the 1950s, Louis revolutionized painting with his seamless unification of figure and ground and unique method of paint application.
Inspired by the enamel stains of Jackson Pollock and the thin washes of Helen Frankenthaler’s “Mountains and Sea” (1952), Louis created his “Veil” paintings by pouring Magna acrylic paint thinned with turpentine onto unprimed, unstretched canvases. Forgoing the use of any brush or palette knife, Louis dictated the trajectory of his paint pours with subtle manipulations of his canvas. In this way, he employed both highly refined technique and a limited element of chance, while also rendering in the picture a transparent record of the process used to create it. By soaking the synthetic paint directly into the raw canvas, Morris stained the fibers of the cotton itself, thus merging figure and support, and, to the delight of Modernist critic Clement Greenberg, emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane and the essential qualities of the medium.
Louis’s “Veil” paintings occupy a pivotal place in twentieth century art, providing a crucial link between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Eliminating the gestural brushwork and spiritual underpinnings of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors, Louis paved the way for the clean lines, cool conceptualism, and process-based practices of the generations to follow.
Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.
Morris Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1962 and soon after died at his home in Washington, D.C. on September 7, 1962. The cause of his illness was attributed to prolonged exposure to paint vapors. The following year, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York mounted a memorial exhibition of his paintings.
A recent review of shows by Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian Gallery and Morris Louis at Mnuchin Gallery gave New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl the chance to express his considered views on Color Field painting:
Color-field reacted against the juicy, muscular styles of Willem de Kooning and his many followers, which [Clement] Greenberg deemed spurious and passé. It won that scrap, in the court of uptown galleries, but soon succumbed to the juggernauts of Pop art and minimalism, which had behind them forces of more than rarefied aesthetic theory: by 1962, Andy Warhol’s silk-screened works equalled the formal strength of color-field and surpassed its éclat, with the added bonus of Marilyn Monroe. Greenberg’s dialectic made color-field sound formidable, but the art proved lightweight in practice, a genteel sort of taste—the visual equivalent of second-Martini euphoria.
Throughout mid-town Manhattan, most of the color we see is generated electronically. Because we are conditioned to seeing color in relation to neon and LED light, we have become immune to the process of seeing color that comes more slowly. The manner in which we instantly catch the flush of digital light is distinctly different from the way we scan the surface of color applied with pigment. Therefore, to actually see a Rothko, a Baziotes or, for that matter, a Morris Louis requires a mental process of slowing down.
