Because of the date and subject matter it is likely that the gouache was done after Louis arrived in New York and that the artist himself is the young man. [6]. [40]. Instead, the focus here will be concentrated on Louis’s middle years, a period just as long—or as short, depending upon one’s perspective—as his artistic maturity. The subject may have appealed to Louis simply because it was a fluid, easily rendered shape. Although many will not allow themselves or their eyes to tolerate this investigation, the eye is the organ on which the artist plays.
[26]. The style was championed most enthusiastically by critic. O’Doherty had opened that same review by stating, “General recognition was just about to come to Morris Louis when he died suddenly last month at the age of 49.” His observation was far more accurate than he could have anticipated. Louis could not have known about this process of transformation, since it was only in 1973 that Miró gave the drawings to the Museum of Modern Art, but Louis’s transformation of bathers into images of fantasy followed a related pattern. 284–89), Louis increasingly separated the vivid colors he used, pouring them in controlled, nearly vertical channels so that the outer contours assumed the tapering slant of the Veils’ silhouette. Furthermore, if one compares Louis’s drawing D43 with Gorky’s Objects, one discovers an analogous vocabulary of biomorphic shapes that emerge from and are embedded into the elaborate, dense crosshatching of the background field. Schucker remembers that Louis had a “natural facility or talent, a feeling for paint and for color in relation to the surfaces”—this despite a “built-in handicap; one of the saving graces of his talent: he couldn’t realize, he couldn’t make anything.” Such a handicap, confirmed by the awkwardnesses of Louis’s extant early figurative paintings, obviously posed a serious problem in a school that followed the beaux-arts practice of progressing from drawing plaster casts through carefully regulated stages until students were finally permitted to work from live models.
[xxv]. Brian O’Doherty, “Art: Three Creators of Clear Illusions,” New York Times, 5 October 1961, p. 34. This résumé, which was used by Angelica Rudenstine to prepare a detailed chronology of Louis’s career, has unfortunately been lost or misplaced in the Louis estate archives and I was unable to consult it. Although the space resembles that of a stage, no musical instruments appear and a sun or moon hovers in the distance.
In pictorial terms, he exploited the inherent visual buoyancy of this format; as a result of reducing the height to as little as 14 inches relative to a length as great at 115 inches, the color becomes disembodied and hovers in space. Others of them, including D48, D66A, and D74, were scribbled in a manner that suggests limbering-up exercises more than drawings, as does the field of D494. Finally Louis used green chalk to outline the ear, shade the nose, and sign the drawing. Mr. Berge recalls that Louis’s lack of money prompted Berge and his brother, also an artist, to permit Louis to use their studio and to share models a few times. exp. Instead, by early June 1954, he had already begun to plumb the “rough” Abstract Expressionist style that was to absorb his energies until early in 1958. The effect, nonetheless, is similar, for one senses that the configuration possesses a “meaning” even though no specific decoding is possible. Two fake sketches for Unfurleds were reproduced as catalogue numbers 6 and 7 of the Koelner Kunstmarkt Katalogue in January 1971. Mervin Jules, another student at the Maryland Institute of Art during this period, also recalls discussing Cézanne’s work with Louis (interview with the author, October 12, 1978). Drawings and paintings by both Matisse and Picasso certainly provided a general influence on Louis’s bathers. no. The seventeen pictures shown included Veils from 1954 and 1958, Florals and a Column painting from 1959–60, and one Unfurled. By the end of April he was confident enough about his newest paintings, the Stripes, to discuss with Andre Emmerich an exhibition of them in October. I think I saw him only three times in my life, despite the fact that we were Washingtonians and he was in the art world.[xxxviii]. This idea is developed at length in the article cited above in note 43. Scattered symbolic notations are absent, having been replaced by the specific inscription, precise grid, and other rectilinear configurations. This pattern is probably as much or more a reflection of his financial situation during those few years than it is an indication of his desire to tackle the issues of draftsmanship. 125) and Blue Veil (cat. For example, when he was trying to make one figure sit in a space, he’d do twenty or thirty versions with hardly any difference between them.” This description applies not only to Louis’s drawings from the 1940s and early 1950s, but also to his mature paintings where the differences between the works in a given series often reflect a subtle process of refinement rather than radical change. [xxxiii] Louis also exhibited at the city’s Peale Museum in 1950 and served on the Artists’ Committee of the Baltimore Museum in 1950 and in 1952, acting as the Artists’ Equity representative during the second term. He had this ability to select something and stick to it. At that time it was removed from sketchpad number 5, a fact determined by the similar spiral binding and by a pattern of tiny worm holes discovered in every page of this sketchpad. warren company sold inventory costing $500 to a customer on account for $700. [10]. Kenneth Noland was an American painter who helped pioneer the Color-field painting movement in the 1960s. Since he had little money and no place to stay he turned to Chet LaMore, one of his Baltimorean acquaintances who had also already settled in the city. But the former picture is 12 1/2 feet long, a customary length for paintings in the series, while the latter is nearly 20 feet long, placing it in a group of only about ten Unfurleds whose lengths range from 18 to 24 feet. Which of the following statements is most objective: The image is filled with thin, organic shapes that are fairly dark with a fairly rough texture and a relatively narrow use of color. nos.
Louis thoroughly controlled his materials, even as he benefitted from their inherent accidents—as had Pollock and Frankenthaler. First spontaneously and then compulsively, Louis traced and retraced the major shapes in ink and colored pencil. At that very moment Pollock embarked upon his first major series of paintings in which figurative imagery was entirely abandoned in favor of a suggestive, calligraphic network that alone carried both form and content. Geometry of a Fish was obviously conceived more carefully than the other fish drawings from its beginning, since its features are all rendered less spontaneously. I have no formal solutions...I work only out of high passion.". Those pictures were neither preceded nor accompanied by small-scale studies on paper, but emerged instead from other paintings that served as studies in which the issues of composition, color, and draftsmanship were tackled full scale (see Phi).[lxv]. To make up for the deficiencies they perceived in their education, which included only one art appreciation course to supplement studio classes, Schucker and Louis went to the library. Louis’s widow reports that he greatly admired Gorky, and Louis himself claimed that he knew Gorky in New York during the 1930s, according to the résumé that he prepared in 1952. In addition, I interviewed Mr. Schucker on June 23, 1978. One especially obvious example of the interplay in Louis’s work between linear figurative imagery and more abstract automatic drawing is evident in a comparison of D54 and several pages from sketchpad number 14, most notably drawing D376. The exceptional quality of this picture, like the Unfurleds to which Louis related it, stems from its absolute integration of color and composition as pictorial coequals. In fact, the “Charred Journal” paintings indicate that Louis viewed grids as integral parts of his pictorial conception and not as ancillary features. The large central images in D218 and D366, for example, no longer suggest either aquatic or zoomorphic creatures.
On large, unstretched canvases, they experimented with new techniques of paint application.