Morris Louis

Biography

On 3 April 1953 two painters from Washington, the forty-year-old Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, came to New York to see the critic Clement Greenberg, hoping he would introduce them to Pollock. Instead of Pollock, Greenberg took them to Helen Frankenthaler’s studio. She showed them how she poured thinned paint straight onto the canvas so that the colour soaked into the cloth; her “Mountains and Sea” was standing in the studio. Louis later called Frankenthaler “the bridge between Pollock and what was possible”. On his return he destroyed almost everything he had painted that year before the trip.

Morris Louis Bernstein was born on 28 November 1912 in Baltimore, the third of four sons; his father, an emigrant from Russia, worked in a factory and later kept a grocery store. At fifteen, in 1927, he received a four-year scholarship to the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts and graduated in 1932. The teaching there was old-fashioned and slow, technique after technique; he found the figure hard to draw and worked his successful compositions up through dozens of repetitions. In the institute’s library and in the Cone sisters’ collection, then still private, he looked at Cézanne and the first European abstractionists. His fellow student Charles Schucker remembered him as a bright loner whose family could not see why he wanted to be an artist.

After the institute came an Italian restaurant, a laundry, Gallup polls, mowing lawns in a cemetery. In 1934 he got a place as an assistant on the government’s Public Works of Art Project and in a school library in Baltimore helped paint the mural “The History of the Written Word”, taking on mainly the lettering; he signed it “Maurice Bernstein”. In 1935 he was elected president of the Baltimore Artists’ Union. In 1936 he moved to New York, at first staying with the Baltimore artist Chet La More, then found a job as a window decorator. He attended David Alfaro Siqueiros’s experimental workshop, knew Gorky and Tworkov, and got his paint from the “bread line” of the manufacturer Leonard Bocour, who handed out leftovers to artists in little wax-paper packets. He was painting figurative work then in the social realist manner: poverty, working people. In October 1938 he made the new name, Morris Louis, official. From 1939, for exactly eighteen months, the maximum term, he was on the easel division of the Federal Art Project.

He left New York in the first half of the forties, the exact date is not known, and settled again with his parents in Baltimore, with a studio in the basement; his brothers helped with money. In 1947 he married Marcella Siegel, the next-door neighbour, and moved into her two-room apartment in Silver Spring, outside Washington: the bedroom became the studio, and they lived, ate and slept in the living room. From 1948 he painted only in Magna, an oil-compatible acrylic that Bocour had developed with Sam Golden, and showed at the annual exhibitions of Maryland artists in Baltimore. He studied Miró and Pollock and drew a great deal.

In 1952 the Louises moved to a house on Legation Street in Washington’s Chevy Chase neighbourhood, and on Jacob Kainen’s recommendation he began teaching evening classes for adults twice a week at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts, run by Leon Berkowitz. There he met Noland, who taught at the same centre. “Suddenly I wasn’t alone anymore,” he said later. A week after the visit to Frankenthaler, in April 1953, his first solo exhibition opened at the same centre: collages from the “Planetary” and “Tranquilities” series and the calligraphic “Charred Journals”, made under the impression of the Nazi book burnings. It was a farewell showing: he had decided to give up all these manners. For several weeks he and Noland worked together, at times on one canvas, and called it “jam painting”, as in jazz: they poured paint, painted with fingers and rags, turned the canvas round, cut up finished pictures. Not one joint work survives. In January 1954 Greenberg put them both into the exhibition “Emerging Talent” at the Kootz Gallery in New York; Stuart Preston in The New York Times praised the canvas which “erupts volcanic clouds of silver paint”.

Then come the series. The Veils, begun in 1954 and brought to completion in 1958–1959: heavily thinned Magna poured onto unprimed canvas layer upon layer, the colours showing through one another and emerging only at the edges. The Florals and Columns of 1959–1960 are denser and more compact: in some the paint spreads out from the centre, in others it stands in vertical shafts cut off by the edge of the canvas. The Alephs of 1960, named after the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, hold the mass in the middle of the field. The Unfurleds of 1960–1961 are the largest: bright bands run in from both sides, from the upper corners or on the diagonal, and in the middle a huge empty canvas remains. In the last two years, 1961–1962, he poured the Stripes, each one separately, from top to bottom, so that the even edge and the uniform width were made by gravity and the capillarity of the cloth. I would say that with him the procedure itself is the content, and that retelling these things in words is almost useless.

He died at home in Washington on 7 September 1962, at forty-nine. A month later the André Emmerich Gallery showed the last Stripes, his fourth solo exhibition in New York; in September 1963 the Guggenheim Museum opened a memorial exhibition of seventeen paintings from 1954–1960. In 1964 he was one of eight artists representing the United States at the Venice Biennale, and in the same year and in 1968 he was shown at documenta in Kassel; large retrospectives followed in Boston (1967), at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1976) and at MoMA (1986). In memory of her husband Marcella Louis set up a fellowship at George Washington University that supported one artist every year.