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Lot Essay
‘The crucial revelation [Louis] got from Pollock and Frankenthaler had to do with facture as much as anything else. The more closely colour could be identified with its ground, the freer would it be from the interference of tactile associations; the way to achieve this closer identification was by adapting water-colour technique to oil and using thin paint on an absorbent surface. Louis spills his paint on unsized and unprimed cotton duck canvas, leaving the pigment almost everywhere thin enough, no matter how many different veils of it are superimposed, for the eye to sense the threadedness and wovenness of the fabric underneath. But “underneath” is the wrong word. The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, colour in itself, like a dyed cloth: the threadedness and wovenness are in the colour … The effect conveys a sense not only of colour as somehow disembodied, and therefore more purely optical, but also of colour as a thing that opens and expands the picture plane’’ (C. Greenberg, ‘Louis and Noland’, in Art International, May 1960, p. 28).
A deep swathe of translucent colour confronts the viewer in Morris Louis’ Gamma. Fiery yellow and deep blue combine to create a totemic expanse of flickering optical illusion. Painted in 1960, it forms part of the second phase of the artist’s Veils series that represent the first major body of work within his abstract oeuvre. Gamma was first owned by Clement Greenberg, the influential critic and essayist who became the single greatest champion of Louis’ work. Having initially met each other through the painter Kenneth Noland in the early 1950s, Greenberg played a major role in the Louis’ artistic development, curating exhibitions and promoting his work. It was in 1960 that Greenberg’s support began to generate increased international interest in Louis’ work, resulting in a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, that year, and a stream of shows before his death in 1962. Louis was retrospectively named by Greenberg as a central exponent of post-painterly abstraction in the exhibition of the same name held at the County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, in 1964.
1960 was also the critical year during which Greenberg published his seminal article ‘Modernist Painting’, in which he analyzed Modernism’s embrace of painting’s inherent flatness. It was this very quality that Louis was to explore in his own ‘staining’ technique, applying thin layers of acrylic to unprimed canvas. As Greenberg himself wrote ‘The crucial revelation [Louis] got from Pollock and Frankenthaler had to do with facture as much as anything else. The more closely colour could be identified with its ground, the freer would it be from the interference of tactile associations; the way to achieve this closer identification was by adapting water-colour technique to oil and using thin paint on an absorbent surface. Louis spills his paint on unsized and unprimed cotton duck canvas, leaving the pigment almost everywhere thin enough, no matter how many different veils of it are superimposed, for the eye to sense the threadedness and wovenness of the fabric underneath. But “underneath” is the wrong word. The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, colour in itself, like a dyed cloth: the threadedness and wovenness are in the colour … The effect conveys a sense not only of colour as somehow disembodied, and therefore more purely optical, but also of colour as a thing that opens and expands the picture plane’ (C. Greenberg, ‘Louis and Noland’, in Art International, May 1960, p. 28).
A deep swathe of translucent colour confronts the viewer in Morris Louis’ Gamma. Fiery yellow and deep blue combine to create a totemic expanse of flickering optical illusion. Painted in 1960, it forms part of the second phase of the artist’s Veils series that represent the first major body of work within his abstract oeuvre. Gamma was first owned by Clement Greenberg, the influential critic and essayist who became the single greatest champion of Louis’ work. Having initially met each other through the painter Kenneth Noland in the early 1950s, Greenberg played a major role in the Louis’ artistic development, curating exhibitions and promoting his work. It was in 1960 that Greenberg’s support began to generate increased international interest in Louis’ work, resulting in a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, that year, and a stream of shows before his death in 1962. Louis was retrospectively named by Greenberg as a central exponent of post-painterly abstraction in the exhibition of the same name held at the County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, in 1964.
1960 was also the critical year during which Greenberg published his seminal article ‘Modernist Painting’, in which he analyzed Modernism’s embrace of painting’s inherent flatness. It was this very quality that Louis was to explore in his own ‘staining’ technique, applying thin layers of acrylic to unprimed canvas. As Greenberg himself wrote ‘The crucial revelation [Louis] got from Pollock and Frankenthaler had to do with facture as much as anything else. The more closely colour could be identified with its ground, the freer would it be from the interference of tactile associations; the way to achieve this closer identification was by adapting water-colour technique to oil and using thin paint on an absorbent surface. Louis spills his paint on unsized and unprimed cotton duck canvas, leaving the pigment almost everywhere thin enough, no matter how many different veils of it are superimposed, for the eye to sense the threadedness and wovenness of the fabric underneath. But “underneath” is the wrong word. The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, colour in itself, like a dyed cloth: the threadedness and wovenness are in the colour … The effect conveys a sense not only of colour as somehow disembodied, and therefore more purely optical, but also of colour as a thing that opens and expands the picture plane’ (C. Greenberg, ‘Louis and Noland’, in Art International, May 1960, p. 28).