Page 58 - Studio International - April 1969

London MORRIS LOUIS AT WADDINGTON GALLERIES, Beth-beth 1958
APRIL 10 - MAY 3 ; JEREMY MOON AT ROWAN Acrylic on canvas
commentary GALLERY, UNTIL APRIL 24; PETER JOSEPH 90x 1431 in.
2
AT LISSON GALLERY, APRIL-MAY; MULTIPLES
Untitled Spring 1962
AND MARKETING Acrylic on canvas
79i x 17-f in.
3
Untitled Spring 1962
Acrylic on canvas
80 x 24 in.

Morris Louis died in 1962 in his fiftieth year.
He had been producing considerable paintings
for less than ten years. He had worked for that
period in privacy and in isolation, well outside
the accepted locations of American avant-
gardism in the years during and after the war.
Even those closest to him—Clement Green-
berg, Kenneth Noland, his wife—are unable
wholly to elucidate the procedures which
enabled him to realize his astonishingly in-
dividual concept of painting. He had left New
York in 1940 for a studio in Baltimore and
remained there for the six years until his
marriage, when he moved to Washington.
But if Louis was separated by 250 miles from
`the new Babylon of art' 1 in the 'forties and
'fifties, he had not always been so far from
the centre of things. According to his own
testimony, at some point between 1936 and
1940 while he was living in New York's
Chelsea district, he shared a 'workshop with a
group of artists— Siquieros and others—in ex-
perimental forms and Duco techniques'.2 cedures, although such a concept might, at a lock's use of Duco enamels and made possible
Duco was the enamel paint used by Pollock stretch, be seen as relevant to both Noland's for Frankenthaler by technical innovations
in his middle period, and during the late work and Olitski's. (They have both been made at her request (oil paint rots unprimed
'thirties Pollock himself participated in involved at times with processes which in- canvas). Some conception of the possibilities
Siquieros's 'experimental workshop' where volve selecting from what has happened, opened up, in particular perhaps the possi-
spray guns and airbrushes were in use, and rather than, as I feel sure Louis was doing, bility of colour being in and not on the sur-
where 'controlled accident' procedures were finding ways to make a particular thing face, free from material associations, jolted
investigated. It is possible, at the very least, happen.) It seems that Louis was concerned both Louis and Noland into experiment.6 The
that Louis met Pollock, although presumably to produce expressive images very much in most exciting developments in painting and
without remarking him and before Pollock the sense that Newman's or Rothko's paint- sculpture since the 'thirties have been those
was confirmed in his drip techniques. Louis ings are expressive and imagistic. His paint- which offered the possibility of a greater
certainly knew Arshile Gorky and Jack ing process, while it produced results similar degree of abstraction. Louis's first acrylic stain
Tworkov.3 He was of the same generation as to what has since been done by Noland, paintings, interlaced and superimposed veils
several of the abstract expressionists (he was Olitski and many others was, I suspect, far of colour on unprimed sailcloth, were made
Pollock's exact contemporary) and worked, less conceptualized than theirs : there was, as late in 1953 or early in 1954. Despite the
like many of them, on the WPA easel paint- it were, less art history in it for him at the novelty of his procedures, Louis painted in
ing project. He had shown himself a compe- time. The art-historical innocence of new some ways like a man of the 'forties. For all
tent enough painter in the late 'thirties, and procedures has been a fruitful source of in- the emphasis that is quite rightly placed on
his Broken bridge, exhibited at the New York spiration for American painters in this cen- his use of colour, shape also plays an impor-
World's Fair in 1939, looks in reproduction as tury; but any new painting process will lose tant part. Moreover shape in Louis's work is
advanced as anything in the contemporary some of its expressive possibilities as soon as it felt more as in Rothko's work, where it is
work of, say, Gottlieb. Had Louis remained has been explored. After a certain point its given a certain weight and density—both ex-
in New York he might have become moder- use tends to become increasingly a means of pressive qualities—than as in Noland's, where
ately celebrated as a painter of the 'Heroic conceptualizing about the nature of painting. it is sometimes sensed merely as a question-
Forties' for qualities far different from those No one now could use Pollock's technique or able by-product of the deployment of colour
which mark him out as the most powerfully range of gestures to embody an emotion as in relation to format. I cannot imagine that
original painter of the 'fifties and early 'sixties. strong as Pollock's. Louis could ever have made that departure
Yet Louis was in many ways a painter of his Louis's breakthrough into real achievement as from the rectangular canvas which many
own generation. The avant-garde if mean- a painter was very largely the result of his painters since the late 'fifties have been forced
ingless concept of 'un-compositional painting' confrontation in 1953 with a medium which into in their flight from the internal and inde-
which has been attributed to him4 is, as was entirely new to him: the stain-painting of pendent image.?
Greenberg has forcefully demonstrated,5 quite Helen Frankenthaler's Mountains and sea of Contrary to much of what has been written
irrelevant either to his intentions or to his pro- 1952, a technique perhaps suggested by Pol- about him, Louis was always intensely precise