Page 60 - Studio International - April 1969

lenge of art: to make something which it was
previously impossible to imagine and which
will retain its power to astonish and to move
us because it will never quite enter the world
of physical things—a part of it will always
remain outside. These last works of Louis's
are unassertive on the one hand and unpos-
sessable on the other. They are magnificently
free. To see them merely as objects is to fail
to see them. The identity of the painting is
obscured while we are examining its texture
and substance. As soon as we stand away the
painting re-emerges like a flame relit; some-
thing much less material, much more mean-
ingful than the surface we have just stepped
back from. These works come from the im-
mortal, not the mortal part of man : from
that quality, in the individual, which is his
singular contribution to the life and con-
sciousness of all men. Louis was not just a
major painter, he was a great one.

NOTES
1 The phrase, referring to New York, is Clement
Greenberg's, from an article, 'Louis and Noland',
in Art International, vol. 4, no. 5, 1960.
2 From a curriculum vitae compiled by Louis,
quoted in the chronology prepared by Angelica
4
Rudenstine for the catalogue of the major Louis Jeremy Moon
retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum No. 19 1968
in 1966. Acrylic on canvas
3 See note 2. 81 x 82+
4 E.g. by Daniel Robbins in Art News, October
1963.
5 Letter to the Editor, Art International, vol. 9, no. 4, A painting is not a still from a shot or sequence modified triangle, or a triangle with attached
1965. Greenberg takes specific issue with Robbins
and with Lucy Lippard. The letter contains much in the film of history. The folly of being too rectangles (truncations of the squares of Union,
valuable and first-hand information, of which I fascinated with tracing the curve of an artist's 1967), but you still felt sure it was basically
have here made use, about Louis's procedures. development is not only logical (looking at the an upside-down `Y'; now the possibilities— a
8 Early in April 1953 Noland introduced Louis to spaces between things instead of at the things, truncated isosceles (instead of equilateral) tri-
Greenberg, and they visited Frankenthaler's studio mistaking the hole for the doughnut) ; it is also angle; two overlapping, but askew, rectangles;
with him. An account of this visit to New York and
of its effect on the two painters is contained in emotional, because its prophetic motivation one fragmentary corner of a vast invisible
Michael Fried's excellent introduction to the Los may hide a sad disengagement from the polygon—press on us with more seriously com-
Angeles show. present. I emphasize this now because these peting claims. Moreover, the kaleidescopic
7 Conceptualization about painting has produced new paintings by Jeremy Moon at the Rowan composition which the equilateral triangle
the notion of the picture as an image in itself, an naturally group themselves into a species dis- generated, was a much easier way for Moon
image 'as such'. This development seems to have
been inevitable if one accepts Greenberg's view of tinct from that of 1967, within the same genus. to work with diagonality as an abstract motif,
Modernism as the Kantian self-criticism of the arts Yet the significance of the change is not in any since triangles, in a way, only have diagonals.
in separation. According to this view Noland must kind of metaphysical 'development' hovering Now the rectangle is faced up to and even sub-
be seen as a more 'advanced' (though not neces- somewhere between a former painting and a jugated. It is a very aggressive shaped canvas
sarily better) painter than Louis. present one. Indeed, there is no lapse or that can handle the rectangle itself as a mere
8 See Greenberg, letter to the Editor of Art Inter-
national, loc. cit. caesura at all; the new works take the same motif; that amounts almost to humiliating it,
9 The widest of Louis's paintings are said to exceed propositions and approach them, quite liter- to putting it in its place on the shelf of possible
the longest dimension of the studio in which they ally, from a new angle. shapes.
were painted. The 1967 works (see Charles Harrison, Other problems which just explode with diffi-
10 In an article, 'Modernist Painting', first pub- `Jeremy Moon's Recent Paintings', Studio In- culty when the centralized composition is
lished in Art and Literature, no. 4, spring 1965.
11 See the Appendix on Morris Louis's Medium in ternational, March 1968) were basically equi- altered to a non-centralized one, are orienta-
the Los Angeles catalogue. Before 1960 Louis used lateral triangles, flat side up, with the sides of tion, colour (in what we could call its 'local
tubes of Magna colour which he himself thinned notched-in corners parallel to the implied bi- form'), and composition. As in the earlier Ys,
down, using Acryloid F-10 and turpentine. When sections of the angles and to the stripes of the the only rectilinear element which is allowed
the paint was changed to meet the requirements of surface pattern. They have a hieratic trilaterial to rest horizontal is the upper edge of the can-
other customers both Noland and Louis found it
unsatisfactory for staining, so the manufacturer, symmetry, like the Mercedes Benz trademark. vas, which knocks out the gravitational sense
Leonard Bocour, provided them with a specially With the exception of a still newer example, of an object at rest and confirms the material
constituted Magna from which the binder was which I will take up later, the new paintings reality of a painting as something (non-rigid)
omitted and which was extremely soft and liquid. date from 1968. Apart from a rectangular one, hanging down from a straight edge—almost an
`He also supplied quantities of the original medium, they achieve an astonishingly greater com- architectural concept of a painting as an
an acrylic resin, so that Louis could dilute the
paint still further' (quoted from Lawrence Alloway, plexity by only a slight adjustment of the 1967 object. The new problem of orientation is that
introduction to an exhibition at the Guggenheim set-up. The overall shape itself becomes much the non-centralized compositions have a
Museum, New York, 1963). more ambiguous : before you could think of a definite feeling of left and right. They seem to