Upright, Diane. Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings (A Catalogue Raisonne). Maryland, USA: Harry N. Abrams, 1985.
This is a book that catalogues all of the work done by Morris Louis. This book includes over 650 of Louis’ work and deals with his development and technique.

Elderfield, John. Morris Louis: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. New York City, NY: Little, Brown and Co, 1986.
This book is mostly about the series of paintings Louis created called his “Unfurled” series. The author mostly analyzes the audiences reactions and opinions of this body of work done by Louis.

Morris, Kelly and Cavagnaro, Lori. Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, 2006.
This book contains 28 of Louis’ work as well as essays written by Klaus Kertess, Alexander Nemerov, and Shepherd F. Steiner on Morris Louis. This book also goes into detail on the different staining techniques Louis used.

Upright, Diane. The Drawings of Morris Louis. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979.
This is a book that catalogues the drawings done by Morris Louis throughout his life. This shows his style and change in technique over time and allows readers to see Louis’ drawings which are far less known than his paintings.

“Morris Louis.” Copyright © 2014 Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). 2014. http://morrislouis.org/.
This is a website that was created by the Maryland Institute College of Art (where Louis’ received his degree) as well as by his estate. It includes a timeline of his work and life as well as a complete catalogue of the pieces he created within his lifetime.

“MoMa: Morris Louis.” © 2015 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. 2009. http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=3607.
The section within the Museum of Modern Arts website on Morris Louis gives a brief overview of his work, life and influence. The images contained within his part of the site show a variety of his work. Each are one of the most famous from each of his series.

“The Art Story: Your Guide to Modern Art.” ©2014 The Art Story Foundation. 2009. http://www.theartstory.org/movement-color-field-painting.htm.
This website talks about the timeline and history of Color Field Painting. All three artists, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland, all used this painting style. It gives key points and talks about how it came to be a painting style and how it progressed over time.

“The Art Story: Your Guide to Modern Art.” ©2014 The Art Story Foundation. 2009. http://www.theartstory.org/artist-frankenthaler-helen.htm.
This section of this website discusses the artist Helen Frankenthaler who inspired the paintings by Morris Louis that were included in his “Unfurled” and “Veil” series. It gives the key points about her life as well as a biography and it discusses her legacy/influence on the art world.

“The Art Story: Your Guide to Modern Art.” ©2014 The Art Story Foundation. 2009. http://www.theartstory.org/artist-louis-morris.htm.
This website gives a short summary of Morris Louis’ life and works of art. But also gives the key ideas that are related to Morris Louis. There is also a section that discusses his legacy/influence as well as a biography.

“Artnet.” ©2015 Artnet Worldwide Corporation. 1995. http://www.artnet.com/artists/morris-louis/.
This website only has around five of Morris Louis’ work available to view but has a variety of other important information pertaining to this artist. The only pieces that you can view are those being sold. However there is a biography of the artist as well as a list of where you can view the pieces in person.

Morris Louis was born on November 28, 1912 in Baltimore, Maryland with the original name of Morris Louis Bernstein. Louis died at 49 years old on September 7, 1962 in Washington, DC from lung cancer thought to be caused by long-term exposure to paint vapors. His birth name was Morris Louis Bernstein until he dropped his last name in 1938. Louis changed his name (dropping the Bernstein) in 1938. People described him as a subdued, quiet, and contemplative. He didn’t talk to others unless they were thoughtful people. He entered a state competition at the age of fifteen, where he won a four-year scholarship to the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts. He was awarded a diploma by the Fine Arts Department in June 1932. After he graduated he held a variety of odd jobs such as peeling vegetables for an Italian restaurant, folding clothes in a laundry, mowing grass in a cemetery, and helping his pharmacist brother. He was associated with four different artists movements which were, Color Field Painting, Abstract Expressionism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Washington Color School. Louis was known to work on his art practice everyday for around 8-9 hours straight. Louis was greatly influenced by Max Beckmann. Louis reportedly did many paintings in Beckmann’s style, including a triptych, which was never found. Beckmann was known as an expressionist painter even though he rejected the movement as well as the term. He had a very figurative style of painting. Louis’ first solo exhibition was in Washington, D.C. at the Workshop Art Center Gallery in 1953 and consisted of 16 paintings and collages, plus drawings. From 1937 to the present date Louis’ work has been included in 528 different exhibitions. His work was only included in 51 exhibitions while he was still alive. When Morris Louis died in September 1962, his paintings had just begun to attract widespread interest and critical attention. Although he had exhibited on a fairly regular basis since 1953, more than four hundred paintings he produced between 1953 and his death remained stored on rolls in his Washington home.

While he was in Washington D.C., Morris Louis, other painters from the area, and Kenneth Noland formed an art movement that is known as the Washington Color School. This movement would later influence what would become known as Color Field Painting. Louis and Noland, accompanied by Clement Greenberg and a handful of other artists, visited Helen Frankenthaler’s studio. Frankenthaler often painted onto unprimed canvas with oil paints that she heavily diluted with turpentine, a technique that she named “soak stain.” This allowed for the colors to soak directly into the canvas. This created a liquefied, translucent effect that was very similar to watercolor. Color Field Painting which would later emerge after Louis’ visit to Frankenthaler’s studio is characterized by large fields of flat, solid color spread/poured across or “stained” into the canvas creating areas of unbroken colored surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting “color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself.” Louis characteristically applied extremely diluted, thinned paint to an unprimed, un-stretched canvas, allowing it to flow over the inclined surface in effects sometimes suggestive of translucent color veils. The way in which this movement places more emphasis on form and process would greatly influence other movements that also had this in mind. These movements being, process art, performance art, minimalism, and post-minimalism. For example, when it comes to minimalism the artists in this movement wanted to eliminate what they considered “non-essential” forms in order for the viewer to focus on what is necessary and the most important form.

In the 1950s Morris Louis and a group of other artists that included the notable Keneth Noland, Gene Davis, Tom Downing, among others were crucial when it came to the development of color field painting. They greatly simplified the idea of what was considered to be the look of a so-called “finished painting.” Louis painted using the same “style” and process of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhart. He, as well as these other artists, chose to eliminate gestural, compositional drawing in favor of large areas of raw canvas. They all used this raw canvas and poured solid planes of thinned and fluid paint onto the canvas, utilizing an expressive use of flat, and intense color, and repetitive composition. Taking a close look at his works reveals Louis process. He poured many colored washes across the 6-by-8-foot canvas, predominantly in a vertical direction. Some of the earliest pours run horizontally across the field, however, and their contours remain visible as delicate arcs that cross the field. In 1954, Louis produced a series of paintings, which he called Veil Paintings. Overlapping, superimposed layers of transparent color that was poured onto and stained into raw canvas characterized this series of paintings. The thinned acrylic paint was allowed to stain the canvas, making the pigment at one with the canvas as opposed to “on top”. Morris Louis is relevant because of his contribution and influence on the art community. Louis’ greatest contribution to the art world was with the development of color field painting and what it stood for/relied on. This being, an attempt to move away from the brushstroke and what was considered masterful and to move towards a type of art that was about the process in which it was created and the form itself. This idea than influenced a number of later artistic movements that moved away from seeing “the artists hand.”

My favorite piece made by Morris Louis was one of the pieces included in his unfurled series. This piece was entitled Beta Lambda and was made in 1961. This piece is 103in x 106in and was made using magna paint. One of the most important and recognizable parts of this piece is the giant white “v” in the center of the painting. This part of the canvas is completely untouched and raw. On each side of the piece there are 12 colored stripes that flow in a diagonal downward motion towards the center of the piece coming from the right side and 14 colored stripes going in the same downward motion coming from the left side. This flow of paint is what creates the “v” in the center of the canvas. Louis uses 26 different colors in this image. The way in which Louis applied the paint to this canvas gives it an extremely flat look due to the stained nature of the paint application. It looks as if the paint was already there and not applied to the canvas. The method in which Louis uses to create these pieces is also evident when you look at/analyze the piece. Louis would place the canvas with one side higher and allow gravity to move the paint in whatever way it chose. This is evident and how the paint flows from each side of the piece. The sheer size of the piece alone is also quite magnificent. Another aspect of the painting that I find truly amazing is how clean all of the lines are. There is s bleeding of the colors whatsoever near the edges which is remarkable and makes these paintings so strong and beautiful.

Beta Lambda
1961
8′ 7 3/8″ x 13′ 4 1/4″
Magna on canvas