Morris Louis, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

Morris Louis
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
5 - 29 April 2000

The Bernard Jacobson Gallery presents a group of major paintings by the American colour field painter MORRIS LOUIS.

At the age of 41 in 1953 Morris Louis was introduced by his friend Kenneth Noland to Helen Frankenthaler. Frankenthaler showed him her 1952 painting Mountains and Sea. The effect of seeing this painting was so great as to cause Morris Louis to destroy almost all of his previous work. The freedom this gave him allowed him to break away from the cubist style of his early work and to develop a technique of controlled staining which took him much closer to his professed love of colour in general and that of Matisse in particular.

In 1954 Morris Louis painted his first “Veil” paintings, as the title suggests these consisted of skeins of colour overlaying each other in a large veil like shape, being unprimed, the colour bleeds into the canvas and gives a sort of ethereal immanence to the paintings. The size of the canvas and the all over nature of the “veils” led to the term “colour field” being used to describe his paintings.

After producing the first “Veils” Morris Louis returned to a more traditionally Abstract Expressionist technique which he employed between late 1954 and 1957, he subsequently destroyed 300 of these paintings and in Winter 1957 began a second series of “Veils”.

In 1960 Morris Louis began the “Unfurleds” . These paintings used a more porous canvas which allowed greater colour saturation and the new Magna acrylic paint which had a more fluid consistency. These technical changes allowed the painting a new spareness in which the larger part of the canvas was left blank and each side has coloured stripes falling inwards towards the bottom of the canvas. In 1961 Morris Louis concluded the unfurled series and began to paint the Stripe series, these paintings were somewhat reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s “Zips” being in the main vertical columns of pure colour albeit on an unprimed field. These groups of work in which the material nature of the painting is very much apparent were influential on the minimalist artists of the younger generation who were at that time formulating their ideas.

Morris Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer in July 1962 and died that September, leaving behind some 600 paintings in his estate. Subsequently every major museum in the world has acquired works by Morris Louis. This is the first major exhibition of the works of Morris Louis in London since 1979.

This exhibition is presented in association with the estate of Morris Louis, represented exclusively by Diane Upright Fine Arts.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
www.jacobsongallery.co.uk