Morris Louis Bernstein (1912 – 1962) was an American painter born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was one of the first to explore Color Field painting in the 1950s, and he formed an art movement known today as the Washington Color School in collaboration with other Washington D.C. painters.

Youth and Education

Louis began studying at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts on a scholarship when he was seventeen, but left shortly before completing his degree in 1933. He worked wherever he could in order to continue painting, and by 1935 he was president of the Baltimore Artists’ Association. Louis then moved to New York City in 1936 and worked in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. While he lived and worked in New York, he shortened his name to simply Morris Louis and became acquainted with other artists such as Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jack Tworkov.

Artistic Development

Color Field Painting

Louis left New York to return to Baltimore in 1940, where he would teach privately. He began using Magna paint, which was a newly developed oil based acrylic paint made for him by Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden, in 1948. Louis moved to Washington, D.C. in 1952, where he worked mostly isolated from the New York art community. Here he developed Color Field painting along with a group of artists including Kenneth Noland, Hilda Thorpe and others. The group was known as the Washington Color School. Its work and ideas contrasted with the other artististic approaches of the 1950s and early 1960s as it greatly simplified the idea of what constitutes the look of a finished painting.

The Color School was inspired by the work of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Ad Reinhardt. They followed in these painters’ tradition in that they narrowed down and eliminated the gestural and compositional aspects of drawing. Instead they used large areas of raw canvas and solid planes of thinned and fluid paint. An expressive and psychological use of flat intense color and repetitive composition was common in the group’s works.

Stain Painting

In 1953, Louis and Noland visited Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio. Inspired by her stain paintings, Louis and Noland together experimented with various techniques of paint application. Louis developed a technique where he applied extremely diluted, thinned paint to an unprimed, unstretched canvas, where he allowed it to flow over the inclined surface. He completely eliminated the brush gesture in his work.

In 1954, Louis produced his series of Veil Paintings. The works were characterized by overlapping, superimposed layers of transparent color poured onto and stained into sized or unsized canvas. They became at one with the canvas, creating a completely flat picture plane.

Many of his works created between 1955 and 1957 were destroyed by the artist himself. From 1958-59, Louis continued his work on the Veils. Similar works including Florals and Columns, Alephs, Unfurleds and the Stripe paintings he created in the years that followed.

Cited:

Morris Louis, Morris Louis: http://morrislouis.org/

Wikipedia, Morris Louis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Louis

The Art Story, Morris Louis: https://www.theartstory.org/artist-louis-morris.htm

Wikiart, Morris Louis: https://www.wikiart.org/en/morris-louis