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Lot Essay
“It is as if Louis rearranges the spectrum at will, and presents us not with stripes of color but a multicolored beam of light.” - John Elderfield (Morris Louis, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986, p. 80).
Arranged in tight bundles of luminous, light-filled colors that encompass a veritable rainbow, the Stripe paintings by the renowned Color Field artist Morris Louis continue to rank among his greatest and most coveted works. Painted directly following the Unfurleds, the Stripe paintings mark the culmination of Louis’s career, as they were painted in the final months before his death in September of 1962. In Number 2-67, Louis has choreographed a particularly rich and elaborate composition, comprising no less than eleven vibrant colors. It is perhaps not surprising that these paintings were once referred to as “Pillars of Fire” by the art critic Clement Greenberg, the artist’s champion and friend. In Number 2-67, the effect is stunning, as each jewel-like color reverberates off its neighbor to create a kind of sparkling prism effect.
Painted in 1962, the present work belongs to a special subset of Stripe paintings in which the top of each stripe is left visible, but the canvas is severed clean at the lower edge. A wide margin of empty canvas is then left to offset the cluster of colors. Louis often placed the striped column slightly off-center, and in Number 2-67, a wide margin of vacant space along the left adds yet more internal tension to the scene. This combination, of a wide canvas margin with a particularly lush rainbow of colors, is what typifies the best of Louis’s Stripe paintings. Similar examples are held in major international museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel.
According to the artist’s catalogue raisonné, Louis’s Stripe paintings, “remained his most exhibited, collected and best-known works” (D. Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1985, p. 33). They have been compared to the formal qualities of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings and are seen to have prefigured Minimalist art of the later 1960s. To create the Stripe paintings, Louis was able to maintain consistent color and luminosity from the top of each stripe all the way down to its endpoint. He was obsessive about the newly invented Bocour Magna acrylics, even corresponding with its owner, Leonard Bocour, in a series of impassioned letters. This new line of acrylics that Bocour developed contained a particular type of acrylic resin that had a transparency clearer than the highest grade of optical glass. This imparts a luminosity and depth of color heretofore unattainable in acrylic paint, such that the colors seemed to glow from within. As the Museum of Modern Art curator John Elderfield remarked, “It is as if Louis rearranges the spectrum at will, and presents us not with stripes of color but a multicolored beam of light” (J. Elderfield, Morris Louis, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986, p. 80).
While his earlier series of Veil paintings made use of translucent washes of paint that were overlaid atop one another in a veiled effect, the Stripe paintings allowed the individual character of each independent color to sing. By this time in his career, Louis possessed an innate understanding of the particular characteristics of each hue, and managed a level of control and finesse that all contribute to making the Stripe paintings so highly-prized to this day. To create them, Louis thinned down the pigment with either turpentine or resin thinner. He carefully and methodically applied each liquid color using a long stick that he wrapped in cheesecloth. By thinning down the paint, Louis was able to drench the cloth and to press it into the very fibers of the cotton surface. In Number 2-67, this effect is left visible along the topmost edge of each stripe, and imparts a vulnerability and warmth to the otherwise pristine column of colors.
“As usual, your paintings continue to haunt me. But [this is the] first time I felt they were beyond my eye...Which, for me, means everything.” - Clement Greenberg (D. Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1985, p. 29).
Louis embarked upon the Stripe paintings in early 1961, and by April of that year, he began discussions with André Emmerich about an exhibition of the paintings that would take place in October. This series would prove to be his final body of work before his death, from lung cancer, in September of 1962. Louis likely painted Number 2-67 in the early Spring of 1962, thus this painting belongs to the last paintings that Louis painted, and they evidence a painter truly in the zone, where the clusters of stripes have become tighter, comprising narrower and more regular stripes, and featuring a wider array of color contrasts. When Clement Greenberg visited the artist’s studio in late March 1962, he was overwhelmed by what he had seen there, and later wrote in a letter to the artist: “As usual, your paintings continue to haunt me. But [this is the] first time I felt they were beyond my eye...Which, for me, means everything” (C. Greenberg, quoted in D. Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1985, p. 29).
Arranged in tight bundles of luminous, light-filled colors that encompass a veritable rainbow, the Stripe paintings by the renowned Color Field artist Morris Louis continue to rank among his greatest and most coveted works. Painted directly following the Unfurleds, the Stripe paintings mark the culmination of Louis’s career, as they were painted in the final months before his death in September of 1962. In Number 2-67, Louis has choreographed a particularly rich and elaborate composition, comprising no less than eleven vibrant colors. It is perhaps not surprising that these paintings were once referred to as “Pillars of Fire” by the art critic Clement Greenberg, the artist’s champion and friend. In Number 2-67, the effect is stunning, as each jewel-like color reverberates off its neighbor to create a kind of sparkling prism effect.
Painted in 1962, the present work belongs to a special subset of Stripe paintings in which the top of each stripe is left visible, but the canvas is severed clean at the lower edge. A wide margin of empty canvas is then left to offset the cluster of colors. Louis often placed the striped column slightly off-center, and in Number 2-67, a wide margin of vacant space along the left adds yet more internal tension to the scene. This combination, of a wide canvas margin with a particularly lush rainbow of colors, is what typifies the best of Louis’s Stripe paintings. Similar examples are held in major international museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel.
According to the artist’s catalogue raisonné, Louis’s Stripe paintings, “remained his most exhibited, collected and best-known works” (D. Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1985, p. 33). They have been compared to the formal qualities of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings and are seen to have prefigured Minimalist art of the later 1960s. To create the Stripe paintings, Louis was able to maintain consistent color and luminosity from the top of each stripe all the way down to its endpoint. He was obsessive about the newly invented Bocour Magna acrylics, even corresponding with its owner, Leonard Bocour, in a series of impassioned letters. This new line of acrylics that Bocour developed contained a particular type of acrylic resin that had a transparency clearer than the highest grade of optical glass. This imparts a luminosity and depth of color heretofore unattainable in acrylic paint, such that the colors seemed to glow from within. As the Museum of Modern Art curator John Elderfield remarked, “It is as if Louis rearranges the spectrum at will, and presents us not with stripes of color but a multicolored beam of light” (J. Elderfield, Morris Louis, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986, p. 80).
While his earlier series of Veil paintings made use of translucent washes of paint that were overlaid atop one another in a veiled effect, the Stripe paintings allowed the individual character of each independent color to sing. By this time in his career, Louis possessed an innate understanding of the particular characteristics of each hue, and managed a level of control and finesse that all contribute to making the Stripe paintings so highly-prized to this day. To create them, Louis thinned down the pigment with either turpentine or resin thinner. He carefully and methodically applied each liquid color using a long stick that he wrapped in cheesecloth. By thinning down the paint, Louis was able to drench the cloth and to press it into the very fibers of the cotton surface. In Number 2-67, this effect is left visible along the topmost edge of each stripe, and imparts a vulnerability and warmth to the otherwise pristine column of colors.
“As usual, your paintings continue to haunt me. But [this is the] first time I felt they were beyond my eye...Which, for me, means everything.” - Clement Greenberg (D. Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1985, p. 29).
Louis embarked upon the Stripe paintings in early 1961, and by April of that year, he began discussions with André Emmerich about an exhibition of the paintings that would take place in October. This series would prove to be his final body of work before his death, from lung cancer, in September of 1962. Louis likely painted Number 2-67 in the early Spring of 1962, thus this painting belongs to the last paintings that Louis painted, and they evidence a painter truly in the zone, where the clusters of stripes have become tighter, comprising narrower and more regular stripes, and featuring a wider array of color contrasts. When Clement Greenberg visited the artist’s studio in late March 1962, he was overwhelmed by what he had seen there, and later wrote in a letter to the artist: “As usual, your paintings continue to haunt me. But [this is the] first time I felt they were beyond my eye...Which, for me, means everything” (C. Greenberg, quoted in D. Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1985, p. 29).