Morris Louis

From Gallery Text for exhibition called: Morris Louis (July-Dec. 1990)

Morris Lewis was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1912. He studied at the Maryland Instiltute of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1933. His first solo exhibition was held at the Workshop Center Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. in April 1953. That same month he and Kenneth Noland visited Helen Frankenthaler in New York and saw the painting, Mountains and Sea, in her studio. She had made it by pouring thnned acrylic paint onto unsized canvas, a procedure called staining. This painting, and its technical innovations, was a great influence on their work and the movement now known as "Color Field" painting.

In a review of the Stripe paintings Louis exhibited in New York in 1961, Irving Sandler acknowledged the whole-hearted pursuit of "the visual excitement that color can create." He wrote: "[They] are sensuous and hedonistic.... [Louis] attempts to produce an all-over resonance that animates the colored and bare areas alike. He does not choose his hues according to any apparent scheme, but the differing widths, densities, and brightness of the color bands are adjusted to this end."

Louis died in Washington, D.C. in 1962. The Solomon R. Gugggenheim Museum organized a memorial exhibition in 1963. Two retrospectives have been mounted since then at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967), also exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1987). With nine major canvases in its collection, the Museum of Fine Arts has one of the largest public collections of his works anywhere.