Morris louis artist biography

Morris Louis, born Morris Louis Bernstein in in Baltimore, Maryland, is widely hailed as one of the leading color field and abstract painters of his time. A member of the important Washington Color School alongside Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Sam Gilliam, Louis was concerned with the importance of color and form. A virtuosic and prolific artist, Louis produced no fewer than three major series of paintings between and —the Veils, Unfurleds, and Stripes—an astoundingly coherent sequence of innovations in abstraction.

Louis attended the Maryland Institute of Fine Arts from to , and subsequently moved to New York, to Baltimore, and finally settled in Washington D.C. in , teaching painting at both Howard University and the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts. Kenneth Noland and Louis, both teaching at the same time, bonded over a shared enthusiasm for the work of artists including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. In April , Noland and Louis visited New York. During

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Morris Louis American,

Born in Baltimore with the name of Morris Bernstein, Morris Louis, working from Washington DC, became a major figure in the mid 20th-century contemporary art scene on the East Coast. He was also a distinguished teacher. Louis is known for his drip paintings, the pouring of thinned acrylic paint onto unprimed or partially primed canvases. His later paintings had irregular stripes of bright colour, often overlapping and merging. He deliberately disassociated himself from the painterly-ness of the loaded brush of the abstract expressionists and pursuing his methods of using thinned paint was, along with Helen Frankenthaller, one of the key figures in the movement called Color Field painting.

 

His parents were immigrants from Russia, and Morris Louis was the third of their four sons. He attended public school in Baltimore and then went on to Gwynns Falls Junior High School, and Baltimore City College. In a state competition that he entered at the

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Morris Louis was born Morris Louis Bernstein in Baltimore on November 28, From to he studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts on a scholarship, but left shortly before completing the program. He worked various odd jobs to support himself while painting and in served as president of the Baltimore Artists’ Association. From to Louis lived in New York, where he worked in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. During this period he met Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jack Tworkov. He also dropped his last name. Louis returned to Baltimore in and taught privately. In he started to use Magna acrylic paints.

In he moved to Washington, D.C. where taught at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts and met fellow instructor Kenneth Noland, who became a close friend. Louis’s first solo show took place at the Workshop Center Art Gallery in In Louis and Noland visited Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio, where the