Louis, Morris

Louis, Morris, 1912–62, American painter, b. Baltimore. Louis is noted for soaking poured paint through unsized and often unstretched canvas. Prior to 1960 he did a series of veil and floral paintings using overlapping areas of muted, transparent colors in organic patterns. After 1960, Louis worked with more precisely defined poured columns of color in a vertical or diagonal format, e.g., Lambda (1960–61; Emmerich Gall., New York City).

Bibliography

See study by M. Fried (1971).

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Louis, Morris

 orig. Morris Louis Bernstein

(born Nov. 24, 1912, Baltimore, Md., U.S.—died Sept. 7, 1962, Washington, D.C.) U.S. painter. He studied painting at the Maryland Institute and worked as an easel painter for the WPA Federal Art Project. Inspired by Helen Frankenthaler's colour stain technique, in 1954 he began a series of paintings titled Veils, featuring stained vertical waves of colour; these works had an impersonal, nonpainterly quality. During this period he became associated with the New York school of Abstract Expressionism. His later work featured diagonal parallel streams of colour that flowed across the bottom corners of the picture plane. In his last series, Stripes, bunched, straight vertical bands of colour are surrounded by empty canvas.

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Louis, Morris (Bernstein) (1912–62) painter; born in Baltimore, Md. He studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts (1929–33), and remained in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. area. His work was strongly influenced by the work of Helen Frankenthaler, and he adapted her staining method to produce a group of paintings called Veils (c. 1954–59), and another collection of florals, Aleph Series (c. 1960). A prolific and inventive artist, his last series, Unfurleds (c. 1960), used broken diagonals.