[ back to my main page 'morris louis' ]

wildbrush's art.to.day - you entered my world of the painters which i prefer -

• Morris Louis     
collection of articles about the artist - 6      

SUGGESTED IMAGES
WESTERN ART:
Alpha-Tau (1961). Morris Louis (1912-1962), acrylic on canvas, 259.1 x 594.5 cm (102 x 234 in.), The Saint Louis Art Museum.

"Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Morris Louis studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts, but left shortly before graduation. In 1947, Louis married and moved to Washington, D.C. A determined and solitary painter, he began work early in the morning and worked until dusk. In 1952, he met and befriended another Washington painter, Kenneth Noland, with whom he shared his ideas. Louis entered a period of major accomplishment in 1954. Inspired by the nontraditional application of paint in the works of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler, Louis gave up traditional easel painting and began to stain lengths of canvas with acrylic paint. Throughout his career, Louis destroyed many of his paintings that he found unsatisfactory, and, in 1955, destroyed an entire earlier year's work. Louis never achieved great material success or fame. His death in 1962, at age 49, cut short his promising, and, at that time, virtually unknown career."

"This painting, Alpha-Tau, is part of a series that Louis dubbed 'the unfurleds,' which he worked on from 1960-1961 shortly before his death. Louis considered this series of streams of paint on blank canvases as his most ambitious undertaking. Since Louis worked in complete privacy, it is uncertain how he achieved these effects. It seems he poured a thinned acrylic paint onto a length of canvas supported by a kind of scaffolding. By force of gravity, the paint dripped onto this unstretched, unsized canvas. Louis manipulated the canvas itself to control the flow of pigment. In this painting, as in all of Louis' 'unfurleds,' the thinned, opaque paint dyes the canvas, bleeding slightly along the edges. The rivulets of color are arranged in banks on both sides of this huge canvas. These bright flows of color on the edges of the canvas draw attention to its glaringly blank center."

Text is taken from:
From the Saint Louis Art Museum Resource Center Information Sheet, cat. #C-18, accession #8:1968, Saint Louis Art Museum.

The following analysis, by art critic Theodore Wolff, offers an interpretation that relates the work to traditional landscapes:

"It has always seemed to me that Morris Louis' huge and wonderfully simplified canvas, Alpha-Tau, was really a landscape at heart! That it said much the same thing, and represented much the same vision, as Albert Bierstadt's dramatic rocky mountain landscapes of the mid-19th century, and Fredrick Church's even more grand and expansive paintings of the Amazon region of South America. But, and this is important, that it 'said' the same things without getting lost in the thousands of details, forms, and textures, that were so important to the older paintings." [Personal correspondence with Theodore Wolff]