Untitled
Morris Louise
MORRIS LOUISE, 1960. MAGNA ON CANVAS.
In a 12 by 14 foot apartment, Morris Louise lay down a canvas measuring 8 by 11.5 feet. Living in quiet isolation in New York, Louise had grown apart from the New York artists that together had pioneered the idea of Colour Field Painting. His work towards the end of the 1950s kept core philosophies from this movement, examining the idea of what a finished painting was meant to be, but a visit to Helen Frankenthaler’s studio had opened his eyes to a new world of techniques and he began combining the ideas of his past contemporaries, such as Pollock, with Frankenthaler’s medium driven ‘Stain Paintings’. So shuffling along the edges of the canvas, his back pressed against the wall, he poured a home-made mix of paint, thinned with acrylic resin and turpentine, and let it was over the unprimed canvas. The result is staggering, and exemplary of Louise’s mastery of form and colour theory. The soft hues mix into darkness, the streaks seem to explode out of their origin in a display of natural fireworks. Between the completion of this work and his death two years later, Louise created more than 150 canvases of this scale, finally feeling like he had found his artistic home.