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拍品專文
At nearly twelve feet across, Morris Louis’s Floral V is a monumental study of color, resulting from his iconic sprays of vibrant pigment. The culmination of an extraordinary career, Floral V is one of Louis’s most supreme works. It is exemplary of Color Field painting, a style pioneered by Louis in the 1940s and 1950s that sought to unearth the expressive qualities of paint. In works like the present work, Louis was among the first to use Magna, a new acrylic paint that offered a glossier finish and would also be frequently used by Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman and Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Exhibited in the acclaimed 2007-2008 exhibition Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-75, Floral V is a historical inflection point and an icon of postwar painting.
Floral V is unafraid of beauty, with its saturated rainbow of colors poured vertically by the artist and a title that explicitly connects it to a subject that Louis’s colleagues might find clichéd or blithe. Reaching beyond the confines of the canvas’s edge, these luminous, textured ‘petals’ desire to extend into the space of the viewer. Yet Louis also gestures toward the ground with a sheer black layer that necessarily tones down the chromatic dance. It complements the scene with earthy hues formed from admixtures and layering of pigment. For every red, orange, and green arrangement, there must be black and grey in which it can grow, like flora emerging optimistically from rocky terrain. These combinations soak directly into the unprimed canvas, creating the stained layers that characterize Color Field painting, such as those executed by the champion of this particular movement, Helen Frankenthaler. As the catalogue raisonné explains of Louis’s Floral paintings, “The majority are characterized by a hovering mass of intense, discrete hues, which are unified by a veiled wash. In the best of these paintings, Louis achieved a delicate balance between gesturalism and colorism without sacrificing compositional coherence” (D. Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1985, p. 20). This compositional balance allows for an expressive confluence of color, line, paint, and the lyrical movements of the artist. As art historian and curator John Elderfield writes, “The best of [the Floral paintings] are glorious pictures, coloristically extremely rich and full of dramatic incident” (J. Elderfield, Morris Louis, ex. cat., New York, 1986, p. 57).
Born in Baltimore, Louis spent his career in Washington D.C., where he would establish the Washington Color School, a regional art movement of likeminded Color Field artists, with his friend and fellow painter Kenneth Noland. In 1954, the venerable art critic Clement Greenberg, who championed Louis and other Color Field painters, introduced Louis to Frankenthaler, who would inspire him to work with unprimed canvas and the staining technique. After destroying many of his paintings created between 1955 and 1957 and creating the Veil paintings in 1958-9, the Florals of 1959-60 would become an important turning point in the artist’s career. Louis focused on juxtapositions and modulations of color, which Elderfield likens to Henri Matisse, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, leading the way for his final series of Stripe paintings, which created a more minimal language out of vibrant colors. In this way, Floral V is a historically essential and transitional work that sheds light on Louis’s rigorous and evolving imagery.
Louis’s influence has been felt internationally since his death in 1962, two years after the completion of Floral V. The Guggenheim Museum, New York, mounted a memorial retrospective in 1963. Critically lauded retrospectives were also mounted by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1967), the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1976), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986). In her review of the 2007-2008 exhibition Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-75, New York Times co-chief art critic Roberta Smith wrote of Floral V, “In ‘Floral V,’ where an inky black washes like a wave over a bouquet of brilliantly colored plumes, [Louis] achieves a silent grandeur, like a Frankenthaler with the sound off” (R. Smith, “Weightless Color: Floating Free,” New York Times, March 7, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/arts/design/07colo.html).
Smith is right when she points out the simultaneous subtlety and dynamism of Floral V. A standout in the coextensive histories of Color Field painting and Abstract Expressionism, the present work is a balletic exploration of color and form that is both critical and earnest, abstract and familiar. Harnessing the emotion of abstraction while still suggesting knowable forms, Floral V occupies an important space in between the dominant concerns of postwar painting. Above all, it is a testament to beauty, its velvety hues swaying passionately between light and dark.
Floral V is unafraid of beauty, with its saturated rainbow of colors poured vertically by the artist and a title that explicitly connects it to a subject that Louis’s colleagues might find clichéd or blithe. Reaching beyond the confines of the canvas’s edge, these luminous, textured ‘petals’ desire to extend into the space of the viewer. Yet Louis also gestures toward the ground with a sheer black layer that necessarily tones down the chromatic dance. It complements the scene with earthy hues formed from admixtures and layering of pigment. For every red, orange, and green arrangement, there must be black and grey in which it can grow, like flora emerging optimistically from rocky terrain. These combinations soak directly into the unprimed canvas, creating the stained layers that characterize Color Field painting, such as those executed by the champion of this particular movement, Helen Frankenthaler. As the catalogue raisonné explains of Louis’s Floral paintings, “The majority are characterized by a hovering mass of intense, discrete hues, which are unified by a veiled wash. In the best of these paintings, Louis achieved a delicate balance between gesturalism and colorism without sacrificing compositional coherence” (D. Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1985, p. 20). This compositional balance allows for an expressive confluence of color, line, paint, and the lyrical movements of the artist. As art historian and curator John Elderfield writes, “The best of [the Floral paintings] are glorious pictures, coloristically extremely rich and full of dramatic incident” (J. Elderfield, Morris Louis, ex. cat., New York, 1986, p. 57).
Born in Baltimore, Louis spent his career in Washington D.C., where he would establish the Washington Color School, a regional art movement of likeminded Color Field artists, with his friend and fellow painter Kenneth Noland. In 1954, the venerable art critic Clement Greenberg, who championed Louis and other Color Field painters, introduced Louis to Frankenthaler, who would inspire him to work with unprimed canvas and the staining technique. After destroying many of his paintings created between 1955 and 1957 and creating the Veil paintings in 1958-9, the Florals of 1959-60 would become an important turning point in the artist’s career. Louis focused on juxtapositions and modulations of color, which Elderfield likens to Henri Matisse, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, leading the way for his final series of Stripe paintings, which created a more minimal language out of vibrant colors. In this way, Floral V is a historically essential and transitional work that sheds light on Louis’s rigorous and evolving imagery.
Louis’s influence has been felt internationally since his death in 1962, two years after the completion of Floral V. The Guggenheim Museum, New York, mounted a memorial retrospective in 1963. Critically lauded retrospectives were also mounted by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1967), the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1976), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986). In her review of the 2007-2008 exhibition Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-75, New York Times co-chief art critic Roberta Smith wrote of Floral V, “In ‘Floral V,’ where an inky black washes like a wave over a bouquet of brilliantly colored plumes, [Louis] achieves a silent grandeur, like a Frankenthaler with the sound off” (R. Smith, “Weightless Color: Floating Free,” New York Times, March 7, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/arts/design/07colo.html).
Smith is right when she points out the simultaneous subtlety and dynamism of Floral V. A standout in the coextensive histories of Color Field painting and Abstract Expressionism, the present work is a balletic exploration of color and form that is both critical and earnest, abstract and familiar. Harnessing the emotion of abstraction while still suggesting knowable forms, Floral V occupies an important space in between the dominant concerns of postwar painting. Above all, it is a testament to beauty, its velvety hues swaying passionately between light and dark.