Lot Essay
At the end of the 1950s, Morris Louis, working in his small Washington studio, developed techniques of diluting and pouring Magna acrylic paint which culminated in the small series of dramatic Floral and Aleph paintings. Widely exhibited and illustrated, Floral, 1959 is considered the most important of this series of radiant paintings. Characterized by bright overlapping pours of paint and repetition of layers of color, they presented a new spatial complexity quite unlike his other works to this date. In these paintings, Louis altered the proportions of pigment to the binders and mediums in the paint, enabling him to maintain highly intense color. As John Elderfield wrote in discussing this series:
Louis began to build constructions, as it were, from these modular components, crossing and interlocking them, at times leaving them anchored to the bottom edge of the picture but more often allowing them to drift in toward the center... The best of them are glorious pictures, coloristically extremely rich and full of dramatic incident" (J. Elderfield, Morris Louis, New York 1986, p. 57).
The Florals and Alephs provide the connection between Louis's darkly toned Veils of the late 1950s and the minimal drama of the Unfurled paintings of the 1960s. Louis painted the vast canvases in his small studio on unstretched canvases and only after completing the works did he make the important decisions of cropping and orientation. After he signed Floral, at some point, Louis then decided the painting should be turned upside down, allowing the signature to remain upside down in the upper right corner of the canvas. Since Louis rarely signed his paintings, this work is especially intriguing in its development as a work of art, and in understanding the way in which the artist worked. Michael Fried characterizes Louis's success in the Florals as being driven by his improvisatory genius, and "contain passages of great loveliness and originality, especially toward the outer reaches of the stained area" (M. Fried 1970, op. cit., p. 31).
Louis had searched throughout the 1950s for an expression of emotional and religious content that was similar to the ambitious agenda that Pollock and Newman were also seeking at this time. Sidney Tillim wrote of the release that came in these works as a form of 'illumination': "Louis's art, even more specifically than Pollock's, locates the illumination on a 'very physical object that is nothing but color, a vast luminous pane through which light filters into the interior of a secular cathedral without walls--the concretion of our utterly self-conscious and material intuition of the universe'" (S. Tillim, quoted in Sandler, The New York School, New York 1978, pp. 2-11, 15, 16).
It is clear when looking at Floral, 1959 that Louis was anxious to discover new ways of seeing and thinking about the nature of art and the interrelation between art and the spirit. John Elderfield characterized his accomplishments as being significant in the context of Modernism: "...his art comprises not so much a temptation of the senses as a deliverance through the senses, which is to say no more and no less than that is the condition toward which the best of modern painting has aspired" (J. Elderfield, ibid., p. 23).
Louis began to build constructions, as it were, from these modular components, crossing and interlocking them, at times leaving them anchored to the bottom edge of the picture but more often allowing them to drift in toward the center... The best of them are glorious pictures, coloristically extremely rich and full of dramatic incident" (J. Elderfield, Morris Louis, New York 1986, p. 57).
The Florals and Alephs provide the connection between Louis's darkly toned Veils of the late 1950s and the minimal drama of the Unfurled paintings of the 1960s. Louis painted the vast canvases in his small studio on unstretched canvases and only after completing the works did he make the important decisions of cropping and orientation. After he signed Floral, at some point, Louis then decided the painting should be turned upside down, allowing the signature to remain upside down in the upper right corner of the canvas. Since Louis rarely signed his paintings, this work is especially intriguing in its development as a work of art, and in understanding the way in which the artist worked. Michael Fried characterizes Louis's success in the Florals as being driven by his improvisatory genius, and "contain passages of great loveliness and originality, especially toward the outer reaches of the stained area" (M. Fried 1970, op. cit., p. 31).
Louis had searched throughout the 1950s for an expression of emotional and religious content that was similar to the ambitious agenda that Pollock and Newman were also seeking at this time. Sidney Tillim wrote of the release that came in these works as a form of 'illumination': "Louis's art, even more specifically than Pollock's, locates the illumination on a 'very physical object that is nothing but color, a vast luminous pane through which light filters into the interior of a secular cathedral without walls--the concretion of our utterly self-conscious and material intuition of the universe'" (S. Tillim, quoted in Sandler, The New York School, New York 1978, pp. 2-11, 15, 16).
It is clear when looking at Floral, 1959 that Louis was anxious to discover new ways of seeing and thinking about the nature of art and the interrelation between art and the spirit. John Elderfield characterized his accomplishments as being significant in the context of Modernism: "...his art comprises not so much a temptation of the senses as a deliverance through the senses, which is to say no more and no less than that is the condition toward which the best of modern painting has aspired" (J. Elderfield, ibid., p. 23).