Morris Louis valuation
Poured thinned acrylic down raw canvas so the colour is in the cloth rather than on it.
Morris Louis was born Morris Louis Bernstein in Baltimore in 1912 and worked in near obscurity in Washington until a 1953 studio visit to Helen Frankenthaler, with Clement Greenberg, showed him a canvas stained rather than painted.
What a work by Morris Louis is worth
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Bio
Morris Louis was born Morris Louis Bernstein in Baltimore in 1912 and worked in near obscurity in Washington until a 1953 studio visit to Helen Frankenthaler, with Clement Greenberg, showed him a canvas stained rather than painted. He adopted the method and refined it: Magna acrylic thinned to the consistency of dye and poured down unprimed cotton duck, so the pigment sinks into the weave and there is no brushmark and almost no surface at all. The Veils, the Unfurleds and the Stripes are the three sequences. He worked in a small dining room, destroyed a great deal, and died of lung cancer in 1962, at forty-nine.
Because the paint is in the fabric, these works cannot be cleaned, and stains, water marks and handling damage in the bare canvas are permanent and highly visible against the untouched ground. That bare canvas is part of the work, not a margin, which is why cropping and restretching are serious interventions and why the original stretcher matters. Almost everything was left unstretched at his death and was stretched afterwards under the estate, so stretching decisions are documented and should be checked. The catalogue raisonne is the reference.
At a glance
- Born
- 28 November 1912, Baltimore
- Died
- 7 September 1962, Washington, D.C.
- Movements
- Abstract Expressionism, Washington Color School
More on Wikipedia.
Silver Spring, Noland and the Washington Color School
From 1947 Louis lived with his wife Marcella Siegel in a two-room apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, painting in the bedroom, and from 1948 he used only Magna, an oil-compatible acrylic made by Bocour. With Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters he formed the loose group now called the Washington Color School, and his first solo exhibition was at the Workshop Center in Washington in April 1953.
In January 1954 Greenberg chose him for Emerging Talent at the Kootz Gallery in New York. Between 1954 and his death in September 1962 he made the Veils, Florals, Columns, Alephs, Unfurleds and Stripes, and Diane Upright's catalogue raisonné of 1985 records them.
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