July 22, 2020
Morris Louis was born in Baltimore and lived in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area nearly all of his life. He studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine aand Applied Arts on a four-year scholarship and during the following years taught privately.
Source: Bulletin, March-April 1972.
Exhibition History"The Abstract Tradition in American Art," Des Moines Art Center, Dec. 7, 1991 - Feb. 23, 1992
"Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings," organized by The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., Oct. 1, 1986 - Jan. 4, 1987; (circulated to: Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas, Feb. 15 - Apr. 12, 1987; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., May 20 - July 26, 1987)
"In Quest of Excellence," Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, FL, Jan. 14 - Apr. 22, 1984
"Morris Louis: The Veil Cylce," Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Feb. 6- Mar. 27, 1977; (circulated to: Denver Art Museum, Apr. 15 - May 29, 1977; Fort Worth Art Museum, June 19 - July 31, 1977; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, N.Y., Sept. 11 - Oct. 23, 1977; Baltimore Museum of Art, Nov. 29, 1977 - Jan. 22, 1978)
"25 Years of American Painting: 1948 - 1973," Des Moines Art Center, Mar. 6 - Apr. 22, 1973
"Morris Louis Veils," Lawrence Rubin Gallery, N.Y., Oct. 26 - Nov. 10, 1971
"Morris Louis 1912-1962," Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Feb. 15-Mar. 26, 1967, circulated to: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Apr. 13- May 24, 1967; (also circulated to the City Art Museum of St. Louis, the Des Moines Art Center's painting was not included in this exhibition)
"Morris Louis Memorial Exhibition - Paintings from 1954-1960," Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, N.Y., Sept. - Oct. 1963
Published References"Morris Louis: The Veil Cycle," Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1977, exh. cat. no.16, color ill. p.15
"25 Years of American Painting: 1948 - 1973," Des Moines Art Center, 1973, exh. cat. no.25, color ill.
"In Quest of Excellence," Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, FL, 1984, exh. cat. no.194, ref. p.96, color ill. p.88
"Morris Louis 1912 - 1962," Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967, exh. cat. no.23, color ill. p.47
"Morris Louis Memorial Exhibition - Paintings from 1954 - 1960," Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, N. Y., 1963, exh. cat. no.6, color ill.
ART QUARTERLY, Autumn 1972, ref. p.323
Max Kozloff, "American Painting During the Cold War," ARTFORUM, " May 1973, ill. p.48
DES MOINES SUNDAY REGISTER, PICTURE MAGAZINE, article by Nick Baldwin, Apr. 23, 1972, pp.20 - 21, color ill.
DMAC Bulletin, Mar./Apr. 1972, cover ill.
Michael Fried, MORRIS LOUIS, Harry N. Abrams, N.Y., 1971, color ill. pl. no.74
Diane Upright, MORRIS LOUIS: THE COMPLETE PAINTINGS, catalogue raisonné, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., N. Y., 1985, exh. cat. ref. no.174, p.207, color pl. listing no.81, p.5, color ill. p.81
DES MOINES ART CENTER: SELECTED PAINTINGS, SCULPTURES AND WORKS ON PAPER, Des Moines Art Center, 1985, ref. pp.143 & 144, color ill. pl.XVI, p.112
Daniel Robbins, "Morris Louis at the Juncture of Two Traditions," QUANDRUM, XVIII, 1965, pp.41 - 54, repro. p. 45
AN UNCOMMON VISION: THE DES MOINES ART CENTER, Des Moines Art Center, 1998, ref. p.175, color ill. p.174
"Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited", High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2006, color ill. pg.15
"Color As Field: American Painting 1950-1975", American Federation of Arts and Yale University Press, 2007, plate no. 16
Diane Upright, "Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings", Harry Abrams, Inc., 2012, color ill. pg.81
Images (1)
Audio (2)
Morris Louis (American, 1912-1962)
Untitled Number 189, 1958
Run Time: 3:07
Recorded by Mia Farrell, Museum Educator / April 2020
Hello this is Mia Farrell Museum Educator at the Des Moines Art Center and I would love to visit and speak with you about Untitled Number 189, a painting by artist Morris Louis.
This work in our collection is a wall sized nearly 8 x11.5-foot abstract painting. Pioneering his own method Louis formed a work that is a dazzling wavy dance of layered hues, varying opacities, moving with gravity vertically across the unprimed canvas. Its vibrant green, warm yellow, golden turpentine thinned acrylics with flashes of violet seep into the gesso-less surface, in ways appearing more like a dyed fabric than paint on canvas. Its natural palette, the encompassing size, hold us like a landscape before it. If we let it, we can feel the glowing sunlight on greenery, an openness some attribute to Morris’s spirit and his quite home. Our eyes move through its shifting color and light, blurring definition between one hue and another, this work has a stretch of infinity.
In the late 1950s, finding his own way of painting that involved taking over his home’s entire dining room space, making due with stapling massive canvas to walls, working constantly, often alone chain-smoking, unless visited by other artists also chain smoking, Morris had nine astonishingly prolific years as an artist and founder of the Color Field movement before dying at the age of 49. Inspired by and working with peers such as Helen Frankenthaler and friend Kenneth Nolen, Louis experimented with methods and mediums, finding ways to eliminate his own touch from the works, utilizing gravity and physically manipulating and bending the canvas to direct the paint’s flow, allowing the medium to create, rendering colored streams of paint as magic.
His work became known as veils as his paint created translucent curtains of subtle color. Our Untitled 189 belongs to Louis’ second series of veils, marked by its shifting golden tones suggestive of glowing or energetic flames.
It seems that in many ways the serious and elf-critical, Morris Louis existed, spiritually, mentally, and physically entirely in his artwork. Painting was all he was said to think about, talk about and do. Reports from his wife and other colleagues Morris was so deeply moved to create that he had left a large number of his paintings in his studio rolled up, unseen, and unstretched at the time of his death. These works now exist in museums all over the world, inviting guests to be still inside of them, to explore their depths and discover the spirit of a man born to be an artist.
