Louis, Morris

Louis, Morris,

1912–62, American painter, b. Baltimore. A practitioner of color-field paintingcolor-field painting,
abstract art movement that originated in the 1960s. Coming after the abstract expressionism of the 1950s, color-field painting represents a sharp change from the earlier movement.
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, Louis was noted for soaking poured paint through unsized and often unstretched canvas. Prior to 1960 he did a series of veil and floral paintings using overlapping areas of muted, transparent colors in organic patterns. After 1960, Louis worked with more precisely defined poured columns of color in a vertical or diagonal format, e.g., Lambda (1960–61; Emmerich Gall., New York City).

Bibliography

See study by M. Fried (1971).

Louis, Morris (Bernstein)

(1912–62) painter; born in Baltimore, Md. He studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts (1929–33), and remained in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. area. His work was strongly influenced by the work of Helen Frankenthaler, and he adapted her staining method to produce a group of paintings called Veils (c. 1954–59), and another collection of florals, Aleph Series (c. 1960). A prolific and inventive artist, his last series, Unfurleds (c. 1960), used broken diagonals.