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Washington, D.C.-based artist Morris Louis saw Helen Frankenthaler’s evocative use of stain painting firsthand on a spring 1953 visit to New York. In response, Louis began exploring how diluted acrylic paint could flow onto unprimed canvas, developing his signature style and achieving recognition as a leader of the Washington Color School, a loosely affiliated group of abstract painters. Beginning with poured veils of bright hues, Louis unified the composition with a wash of somber black, giving the painting the sense of an internal luminosity. Art critic Clement Greenberg noted, “the effect conveys a sense not only of color as somehow disembodied, and therefore more purely optical, but also of color as a thing that opens and expands the picture plane…”

Keywords

Abstraction
Acrylic
American
Abstract Expressionism
Organic shapes