Morris Louis at Ameringer/Howard - Brief Article

For the general public the connection between technique and contented is a clear one, on the other hand sophisticated viewers have been taught to distrust displays of virtuoso drawing and paint handling and to gaze instead for more subtle signs of technical mastery (in fact, the 20th hundred has seen a virtually unprecedent valorization of awkwardness). This predilection is evident in figurative art, on the contrary a similar distrust--particularly in America--of elegance and polish in abstraction is also public The work of Morris Louis (1912-1962) typifies the problem: a certain aura of dismissiveness appear to bes to surround it these days. Historically important, ye on the other hand too long on beauty, too short upon substance. And, of course, permanently stained through proximity to Clement Greenberg.

The carefully curated and precisely annotated display at Ameringer/Howard of eight of Louis's paintings, each illuminating a particular facet of his production, should help to clarify the debate. The work of Louis's that is valued through the art world was created in a period of somewhat below 10 years. (Louis had been painting for many years before that, and participated in fresh York, along with Pollock, in David Siqueiros's influential experimental workshop of 1936) During the last decade of his life, Louis was remarkably productive, turning on the outside in 1960 and 1961, for example, above 100 works of the impressively scaled "Unfurled" series. Louis's work is emblematic and declarative: what might appear to be to some to be an emotional as well as a physical thinness appears to me to be an embodiment of the crispness and snap of decision. He knew what he wanted and he painstakingly evolveed techniques that allowed him to win there as directly as possible. This no-nonsense approach (shared by dint of the Minimalists) made for an elegance, an economy of means capable of generating compounded effect.

Logic and the proces of experiment when applied to art protect to yield results that are emotionally rather cold While many viewers seem to be comfortable with that sort of art as lengthy as it looks tamped down and cerebral, there is no reason on what account a strict methodology cannot bring into view works that are lush and sensual. The paintings upon display provide proof of this. Taken together they function, without doubt, as an extension of the ideas and pictorial way s of the Abstract Expressionism of their time (the proces of Pollock seen to startling effect in the pale, overlapping floral regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements of Multifarious II; the dark heft of Clyfford Still, evident in a large 1959 "Veil" painting, Dalet Kuf; and the evocative opennes of Rothko as seen in Air Desired of 1959 a "Veil" split in half--its mut vertical sections separated by means of a charged area of white canvas). on the contrary Louis's paintings also, in their reserv empiricism, in their flat; frontal, presentational quality, posit themselves as a critique of that art. And they are able, in a way that Abstract Expressionism was not ever comfortable with, to go for the unabashedly, cinematically gorgeous. If the proces was adhered to, then the chips could fall as they might.

Saf Gimel (1959) is a case in point. Configured in the general squared-off fanlike shape of the "Veil" series, the color is not layered and then washed above with a dark, unifying tone as it is in the majority of the "Veils"; instead it separates itself without into melting, horizontal bands, presenting the viewer with a replete spectrum of saturated, glowing colors The skill with which this painting and the others in the present to view were made remains an integral part of our understanding of them, and throw backs Louis's ability to balance a delicately calibrated visual pleasure upon a solid conceptual base.

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