Morris Louis – from a seeking artist to a leading figure of American Color Field Painting
Morris Louis, whose paintings are icons of American Color Field Painting, rose to fame almost overnight in 1959, the year “Addition VII” was created. Born in Baltimore, the artist was 46 years old at the time. Tragically, he had only three years left to live. One of the most decisive moments in his career came when Clement Greenberg, an influential American art critic responsible for promoting and recognizing post-war abstract art, discovered Louis and his “Veil Paintings,” a series he had been working on since 1954, at an exhibition at French & Company in New York. Greenberg soon became Louis' strongest supporter. Morris Louis completed his degree at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts in Baltimore in 1932. However, his style remained disparate until 1953, drawing on figurative tendencies and Jackson Pollock's Abstract Expressionism during these years. Until 1953, Louis remained an artist searching for his style, only finding his characteristic form of expression through a seminal experience. While staying in New York with his friend and fellow artist Kenneth Noland in 1953, the two artists visited Helen Frankenthaler's New York studio on the initiative of Clement Greenberg.




Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler – a visit to the New York studio as a pivotal moment
On the walls of Frankenthaler's New York studio, they came across the gestural painting of Abstract Expressionism and the artist's innovative “soak stain” technique. Greenberg, who had already noticed Kenneth Noland's potential in an exhibition at Kootz Gallery, encouraged the promising exchange between Louis and Noland with Helen Frankenthaler, a protagonist of Color Field Painting. It turned out Greenberg was right, as the influence of Frankenthaler's famous composition “Mountains and Sea” (1952, National Gallery of Art, Washington), one of the first paintings in her famous “soak stain” technique, would become a defining feature of Morris Louis's work. The artist had only partly soaked the almost 2.20 x 3 meter unprimed canvas with heavily diluted oil paint so that the paint was not applied to the canvas but blended with the visible texture of the fabric. This technical breakthrough of Frankenthaler became a key artistic experience for Morris Louis, who began working on his renowned 'Veil Paintings,' a series of works in which he diffused paint across the canvas in gentle veils. Today, these paintings from between 1954 and 1959 are regarded as the pivotal point in his artistic career, marking the beginning of Louis' mature period as a painter, which lasted only eight years and came to an abrupt end with his untimely death in 1962 at the age of only 49. However, during these eight years, Morris Louis created something tremendous with his wall-filling color worlds: he liberated abstract painting from the contours of color. He merged the heavily diluted acrylic paint with the unprimed canvas in an inimitably gentle and outline-free manner, thus shaping a completely new painterly aesthetic.



Morris Louis' “Additions” - Rare icons of American Color Field Painting
The eight wall-filling color sensations of the “Additions” series, created in 1959 at the same time as his later “Veil Paintings,” appear like mysteriously ethereal color worlds. At least six of these works are held in significant international museum collections today. “Addition VII” was sold from the artist's estate to the Linda and Robert Schmier Collection, which includes significant works of American Post-War Modernism, among them paintings by Helen Frankenthaler. In 2012, it passed into another renowned private collection of American Post-War art.



Louis made a vital contribution to American post-war art and contemporary abstraction with these exceptionally sensual paintings from his mature period, overwhelming in their monumental scale. However, the tremendous public interest in Louis' bold and intriguing new painting style and its international recognition only began after he died in the 1960s. In the following years, it was primarily driven by Clement Greenberg, who lectured on Louis' 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 described his work as follows: “Morris Louis created a unique late form of Abstract Expressionism, then radically transformed it in a way that prepared for the reductive art of the 1960s. The resplendently beautiful canvases of his mature period are as compelling and as radical in their abstraction as any work in American art. “At the height of his powers,” writes John Elderfield, Louis's art attained a sense of “deliverance through the senses ...the condition toward which the best of modern painting has aspired.” (quoted from ex. cat. Morris Louis, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1986, blurb). This explains why Morris Louis' outstanding creations are owned by major museum and private collections in the USA and Japan, and why they are absolute rarities on the European auction market. [JS]