A school of non-conformists exists waiting for the next to negate it in turn. Louis’s widow recalls that on one such visit he reluctantly agreed to a ride on a glass-bottomed boat; its viewing platform would have presented a regular structure through which fish were viewed, a situation analogous to the grid and fish in the drawing of 1953. Para I (cat. This reflects a change in attitude from the “Charred Journal” paintings of a few years earlier, which were painted linear renderings of the formal and figural conceptions of his contemporary drawings. Twelve years younger than Louis, Noland was far more sophisticated about the art world and knew many more of its participants. nos. The other two vertical figures in D248 are not readily identified as bathers and their elaboration in D39 suggests that Louis never thought of them as such. Baltimore’s art community, including the Maryland Institute, was profoundly conservative in the 1930s and 1940s. [33]. Louis’s exhibition history tells the story: two exhibitions in 1959; six in 1960; seven in 1961; eleven in 1962, including one-man shows in Paris, Dusseldorf, and Stuttgart in addition to the one in New York; seventeen in 1963, including a major memorial retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; nineteen in 1964, including a featured position in the Venice Biennale; and ten in 1965, including a European traveling retrospective. The Washington Post’s favorable and lengthy review noted that the work of the “young newcomer from Baltimore” demonstrated a “strong cohesion, whether the forms are nebulous and free, or whether an architectural structure binds them in severely controlled geometries.”[xli] In a similar vein the critic for the Times-Herald observed that Louis “promises a plastic emotional understanding that is as cohesive and sincere as it is personally decorative and free.”[xlii]. [28]. Similarly, although D495 employs the framing device so characteristic of Marin’s work, it is here rendered in dense, vivid colors rather than as a margin of breathing space. [xlviii]. As I remember the drawings they were satirical figure subject matter—interesting and good. The Baltimore Museum of Art opened in 1923, but its exhibitions for many years were overwhelmingly conservative in nature, accurately reflecting the taste of its visitors. Other drawings from this period reflect Louis’s interest in another subject familiar in Picasso’s oeuvre: bathers and horses. This droll antelope also appears in drawings D4, D11, D39, and D237, almost without modification, always gazing searchingly into the sky. no. [i]. His extant paintings from these years (cat. These groups demonstrate clearly that in this series, Louis focused primarily on color relationships and secondarily on linear and compositional refinements. Her hair is also rendered more suggestively than descriptively; black and brown looping lines accent the area and distinguish it from the face and neck, which are shaded with the same crayon tones. It engages in one recurring gesture: holding a baton or sword, it extends the rod toward one of its companions as if to honor (D58, D59), or perhaps to threaten (D87, D93, D95). no. Leon Berkowitz noted in his introduction to the catalogue the personal, organic calligraphy that characterized the paintings. 126), Louis chose not to employ the bronzed scrim. 53), he subdued his colors either by extensive thinning or by veiling them with layers of diluted black. Harold Lehman, “For an Artists’ Union Workshop,” Art Front (October 1937), quoted by Hurlburt, p. 245. As Joseph Solman reported in a review in Art Front, “Morris Louis contributes Evicted and Talk of Relief, paintings handled in the key of the Mexicans.”[xxiv] This first known mention in print of Louis’s work and the first public indication that he had changed his name make it clear that he had adopted the social-realist subject matter characteristic of so much painting in New York during the 1930s. Francis V. O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and Now (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1969), p. 19. In a few exceptional triadic Veils, like Tet (cat. . The Omegas may have resulted from a direct effort by Louis to avoid comparisons with the paintings of Clyfford Still, which some of the 1959–60 paintings had prompted. Like the majority of works displayed there, many of the paintings in this exhibition depicted subjects with markedly socialist overtones. Louis effectively employed this ambiguous form and varied, dense techniques to establish a disturbing mood, for the central images disrupt both the relationships of scale and the spatial illusion of the scene. In 1952 Louis and his wife moved into Washington, where they had purchased a home on Legation Street, NW. A major influence on Minimalism, his iconic works include nested black and white stripes and concentric, angular half-circles in bright colors. Had I been interested in medicine, for instance, I would go in for research, new fields, etc. . Visual unity in art can be demonstrated through the visual elements of shape, line, color, etc...but can also be unified conceptually. [lx]. Morris and I were sort of freaks to the family, but they were nice about it,” Schucker has remarked. These last works are tighter and more precise, the grammar is more knowing, the conjugations are more controlled. toward a synthesis of expressive and formal values,” and he observed that “tomorrow’s vanguard art will probably be abstract expressive (rather than expressionist).” He noted that in Louis’s “mural-sized, vast” pictures, “the excitement of the painting, the effect of hurtling movement seems to come largely from a most effective use of line: taut, springy, strategically placed.”[7]. No evidence suggests that Louis, like Smith, Pollock, and other abstract expressionists, was interested in pictorial imagery that directly reflected the psychoanalytic theory or symbolism explored in the writings of Freud and Jung. They had pointed him in a direction that would have taken him beyond the general style of late Abstract Expressionism, which was often characterized more by rhetoric than by conviction. [xxxvi] In 1953 Louis obtained a teaching position for one term at Howard University and, at about the same time, began to teach private pupils in Washington in addition to his group in Baltimore. Both drawing and color relationships contribute elements essential to the Unfurleds’ power. Such unbridled colorism in concert with dynamic form was unprecedented in the Veil series. [ii]. It is not surprising that Louis considered the Unfurleds his greatest achievement. 1–12) contain little evidence of great talent. no. Cheer Tryouts (national conference) 8 Terms. Consecutive estate-numbered paintings also reveal Louis’s experimentation with the size of the Unfurleds. [lxii] For Baziotes the beast carried overtones of primordial creatures and the famous race of one-eyed Cyclopes of Greek mythology. The results of at least one of these trips will be examined later, but one point should be stressed from the outset: regardless of Louis’s apparent disdain for the medium of drawing as against that of painting, many of his drawings are wonderfully relaxed and joyous, while others are so rich and complex that they indicate his serious regard for them. The are mostly cool, fairly dull and middle dark to light. During this period, Louis subjected virtually every feature of the Veils to such careful scrutiny that the series appears to have undergone a radical dissection. One such visitor, a student at the Maryland Institute of Art named Shelby Shackelford, became the center of a controversy that demonstrates the problems encountered by imaginative art students in the city at that time. 178–82). The extant mural was recently rediscovered in the Hampstead Hill School by Mildred Blum, a docent at the Baltimore Museum of Art, who passed the information on to me. . [9], This statement seems to imply that Louis thought the Veils represented “an end,” and that the “next try” lay more in the direction of the vigorous, compressed space he had introduced into his work in 1953 rather than in the Veils’ “simple pattern and slow motion.”. These later works also reflect Louis’s interest in a similar direction explored in the 1940s by several abstract expressionists, notably Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb, who used hieroglyphic forms as a means of conveying a universal content. (Louis rarely used materials other than paint and canvas unless he ran short of them, but his limited finances made it impossible for him to buy supplies in large quantities until 1960.) Although Louis may have learned from Miró’s example, it is unlikely that he knew how close to the Spaniard he was in the manner in which he derived the imagery of his fantasy drawings. The loose structure of many of the Themes and Variations paintings reflects Louis’s willingness to experiment as well as his failure to find a solution to the problem. After 1953 his career was marked by an increasingly public profile. Although these paintings have sometimes been cited as evidence of Louis’s response to Pollock’s work, it appears that Miró’s adaptation of surrealist automatism is closer to their spirit; the easel scale of the pictures, their lyrical rather than aggressive tone (despite the subject), and the openness rather than density of the space are all more akin to Miró than to Pollock. [viii] Abstract art as such simply “didn’t exist” at the school, the atmosphere of which was so restricted that in Schucker’s view the primary problem he and Louis faced was “to develop as artists in any sense of the word.”. [xli]. no. . Installation view of a 1968 exhibition at the Andre Emmerich Gallery of paintings done by Morris Louis in the spring of 1962. . [xliv]. [lix]. Similarly, another untitled oil painting of this period depicts a man lying on his back on a city street, clutching a pint bottle of alcohol in one hand and a smoking pistol in the other. When the focus is shifted away from the early paintings to Louis’s drawings from those same years, however, the terms repudiation and revulsion no longer accurately characterize the relationship between the pre- and post-1954 work. One final drawing that probably owes a debt to Picasso is D65, with its contrasting of densely modeled heads on a fluid, linear figure. No broad generalizations can be offered about the relationship between Louis’s drawings of 1953 and his paintings of that year. Color Field Painting is a tendency within Abstract Expressionism, distinct from gestural abstraction, or Action Painting. Beth Chaf (cat. In 1963 the Phillips acquired Louis’s Stripe painting No. Brian O’Doherty, “Art: Three Creators of Clear Illusions,” New York Times, 5 October 1961, p. 34. Is it truly a knight or perhaps some type of magician? March 7, 2008, By Michael O'Sullivan / Louis absolutely identified drawing and painting, color and line in this series. For example, Louis’s repudiation and destruction of the paintings he created from 1955 through 1957 clearly was due partially to the critic’s low opinion of them. Four remain in the Louis estate, one belongs to Daniel Millsaps, and another to Leonard Bocour. The large sun shining brightly in the sky supplements the beach setting, while the high horizon line restricts spatial recession. Drawings D14, D17, and D107 explore this subject, but D107 is particularly Picassoid in that the position of the horse’s head and the flattened oval that generates light are both obvious borrowings from Guernica and related works, despite the fact that Louis’s horse is more dislocated than agonized.[xlv]. [xlii]. He also does this near the outermost corners, generally in the third or fourth rivulet from the corner. The eldest brother was a physician and the second a pharmacist; the family was struggling to raise tuition money to put the youngest through medical school when Morris made a career decision that profoundly distressed his parents.

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