MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962) the Emergence of Morris Louis [This Text Is Reproduced in Its Entirety from the Following Publication
MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962) The Emergence of Morris Louis [This text is reproduced in its entirety from the following publication: Upright, Diane. Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985, pp. 9-34.] Little more than twenty years after his death in 1962, the reputation of Morris Louis is securely established. An extensive bibliography and exhibition history, as well as the presence of his paintings in the collections of almost seventy museums around the globe, provide clear testimony to this fact. Yet, astonishingly, that part of his career on which his reputation is based lasted only five years, during which time he produced close to six hundred paintings. Of these, about four hundred are enormous, mural-sized canvases. The artist who produced this remarkable oeuvre remains an elusive, enigmatic figure to this day. A loner, especially during the years of his greatest achievement, Louis had few friends and rarely discussed his art with anyone—not even his wife. Never part of the New York art world except for a few years spent working for the Works Progress Administration in New York during the 1930s, he chose instead the relative isolation of Baltimore and, later, Washington, D.C. Even after he had achieved some success, toward the end of his tragically short career, he still worked alone in a studio so small that he could only work on one canvas at a time. In fact, in the case of the largest paintings from his series of Unfurleds, he could only work on half of a canvas at a time.
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