Morris Louis
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. 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.
If you own a work by Morris Louis
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