Morris Louis

Morris Louis (born Morris Louis Bernstein) was born in Baltimore in 1912. From 1929 to 1933, he studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Art, but left prior to completing the program. He worked at various odd jobs to support himself while painting and in 1935 was president of the Baltimore Artists' Association. From 1936 to 1940, he lived in New York and worked in the Works Project Administration. During this period he came to know painters Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jack Tworkov. At this time, he dropped his last name. In 1940 he returned to Baltimore and taught privately. In 1948, he pioneered the use of Magna paint -- a newly developed oil based acrylic paint specially fabricated by paint-makers Leanoard Bocour and Sam Golden. In 1952, Louis moved to Washington where he would work in relative isolation, developing his powerful, individual pictorial identity.

Although he had several solo exhibitions in the early 1950s, in 1957 when he mounted an exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, Louis began to be recognized. He then held two exhibitions at French and Company in 1959 and 1960, both curated by Clement Greenberg-who as a critic was nearing the apogee of his influence. In 1961, '62 and '63 he showed with Andre Emmerich Gallery, and also mounted solo exhibitions in London at the ICA and in Milan. In 1963 Lawrence Alloway curated Morris Louis: Memorial Exhibition, Paintings from 1954-1960 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Also in 1963 Louis was included in Greenberg's canon-forming Color Field exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction, which travelled from Los Angeles and Minneapolis to the Art Gallery of Toronto. Michael Fried curated a traveling survey for The Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 1967 Additionally, among the many posthumous exhibitions, are Morris Louis, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987 and the recent Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited, organized by the High Museum, Atlanta.