Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler – From Seeker to Protagonist of American Color Field Painting  
A year after the creation of “Dalet Vav,” Morris Louis, whose paintings have since become icons of American Color Field painting, suddenly rose to fame. One of the most pivotal moments in his career came when Clement Greenberg, an influential American art critic known for promoting and championing postwar abstraction, was deeply impressed by his “Veil Paintings” at an exhibition at French & Company in New York, and henceforth became Louis’s chief patron. At the time, Morris Louis was 46 years old and, tragically, had only three years left to live before his untimely death. Born in Baltimore, the artist graduated from the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts in 1932; however, his style remained somewhat disparate until 1953, drawing on figurative tendencies and eventually embracing Jackson Pollock's Abstract Expressionism. Until 1953, however, Louis was still searching for his artistic voice, and it was only through a pivotal experience that he found his characteristic style: During a stay in New York City with his friend and fellow artist Kenneth Noland, Louis paid a visit to Helen Frankenthaler's studio.


Frankenthaler's New York studio was not just a place where they encountered the gestural painting style of Abstract Expressionism, but also the artist's innovative “soak stain” technique. Greenberg encouraged what he saw as a promising artistic exchange among Morris Louis, his friend Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler, the protagonist of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting. Greenberg was once again proven right, for this exchange and the sight of Frankenthaler's famous composition “Mountains and Sea” (1952, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), one of the first paintings in her famous “soak stain” technique, would leave a lasting impression not only on Kenneth Noland but also on Morris Louis. The artist had only partially soaked the almost 2.20 x 3 meter unprimed canvas surface with heavily diluted oil paint, and in this way had not applied the paint to the canvas, but instead blended the clearly visible fabric structure with the glazed paint. Frankenthaler's technical achievement became a key artistic experience for Morris Louis, who immediately thereafter began his famous series of “Veil Paintings,” a series of works in which he spread heavily diluted acrylic paint in soft veils of color on the canvas, including the present work.


“Veil Paintings” – Louis' iconic spatial representations of incorporeal color
Present-day art historians consider Louis's “Veil Paintings,” primarily created in 1958/59, to be the crucial milestone and culmination of his artistic career. They mark the beginning of his mature creative period, which lasted only 8 years and ended abruptly with his untimely death at 49 in 1962. In this concentrated phase, however, Louis created a powerful body of work with his wall-sized, gently poured color adventures on unprimed canvas: he liberated color and thus abstract painting from contours and fused the heavily diluted acrylic paint with the canvas by pouring it in an inimitably gentle and contourless manner, layer by layer. With these iconic pieces, Louis created an entirely new painterly aesthetic in which color extends into space in a pure, incorporeal, and auratic manner. These huge, mysteriously ethereal color worlds offer genuine, intense immersion in color and its infinite nuances, shades, and layers.


The present monumental work, “Dalet Vav,” formerly part of the collection of French race car driver René Dreyfuss and subsequently in the acclaimed Graham Gund Collection alongside works by Willem de Kooning and Franz Klein, among others, is furthermore fascinating for its subtly nuanced, natural color tones ranging from green and ocher to warm, earthy reds. Louis comes from a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, and so the Hebrew title “Dalet Vav” refers to a connection between the mundane and the spiritual, the physical and the intellectual, and can thus be read as a kind of symbol of Morris’s “Veil Paintings,” which transport us into an abstract, spiritually transcendent world on account of their captivating aura. Along with other outstanding works from the Graham Gund Collection, “Dalet Vav” was on display in the exhibition “A Private Vision: Contemporary Art from the Graham Gund Collection” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1982. Since 1986, the compellingly subtle color world of “Dalet Vav” has been one of the highlights of a select private collection of outstanding American paintings.
With his visionary “Veil Paintings” — sensual and overwhelming in their monumental proportions —Louis made an essential contribution to American post-war art and contemporary abstraction. However, the tremendous public interest in Louis's bold and fascinating new style of painting, as well as its international recognition, did not begin until after his early death in the 1960s and was also significantly shaped by Clement Greenberg in the years that followed. It was Greenberg who gave a lecture on Louis's work on the occasion of the major Morris Louis exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in December 1986. The MoMA exhibition catalog at the time stated: "Morris Louis created a unique late form of Abstract Expressionism, which he then radically transformed to prepare the way for the reduced art of the 1960s. The radiant, beautiful paintings of his mature period are more convincing and radical in their abstraction than any other work of American art. ‘At the height of his powers,’ wrote John Elderfield, Louis’s art achieved a sense of ‘liberation through the senses ... the state to which the best of modern painting aspires’ (quoted from: exhibition catalog Morris Louis, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1986, blurb). It is therefore not surprising that Morris Louis' outstanding creations are held in major museums and private collections from America to Japan, and that they are rarely offered on the European auction market. [JS]