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Lot Essay
“It is as if Louis rearranges the spectrum at will, and presents us not with stripes of color but a multicolored beam of light.” John Elderfield (Morris Louis, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986, p. 80).
A beam of chromatic intensity arranged as a tight bundle of luminous colors, Pillar of Celebration constitutes a critical example from renowned Color Field artist Morris Louis’s Stripe series. Painted immediately following the Unfurled series, the Stripe paintings mark the culmination of Louis’s career, synthesizing the figural component of his Veil series with the colorism of the Unfurled series to realize a revolutionary epitome in the artist’s distinctive artistic language. Among the artist’s greatest and most coveted works, this series was executed just prior to Louis’s untimely demise from lung cancer in September of 1962, marking the premature denouement of the artist’s incredible practice just as he reached the height of his powers, finally attaining critical and commercial success.
In Pillar of Celebration, Louis choreographs a particularly rich and dynamic composition, with ten stripes of vibrant colors extending down the canvas, comingling at the edges into a singular expressive form expressive of a quiet monumentality. Louis uses his stripes here to cauterize the picture pane, imposing an apparent velocity onto the composition where the magisterial juxtaposition of the differing hues, values, intensities, and temperatures of the chosen colors establish a plenitude of experiences singularly evocative of pictorial space. Thus, Louis is able to irradicate all traditional elements of painting from his canvas, isolating color alone in his composition. Louis completes the artistic revolution against Cubism and figuration first initiated by the Abstract Expressionists, demonstrating how a pure abstracted picture could be made solely through the pursuit of color, pioneering the language of minimalism and Color Field painting which would come to dominate the 1960s.
The great art critic Clement Greenberg discovered Morris Louis and became his most ardent champion and confidant, advising the artist on his work, introducing him to artists and gallerists, and curating his shows. Upon seeing the first of the Stripe series in April 1961, Greenberg heralded the works’ technical virtuosity and formal aestheticism, giving the series the name “Pillars of Fire” and writing to Louis how “as usual, your works continue to haunt me. But first time I felt they were beyond my eye for the time being. Which, for me, meaning everything “ (C. Greenberg, letter to Morris Louis, 23 March 1962, quoted in Diane Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, cat. rais., 1985, p. 29). Upon Louis’s request, Greenberg also provided the titles to many of the works in the series sold before the artist’s passing. Utterly infatuated with the artist’s series, Greenberg chose Pillars of Celebration out of the examples Louis presented to purchase directly from the artist for his personal collection, endorsing the work as one of the best examples of the series.
In early 1961 Louis began to work on the Stripe paintings, described in the artist’s catalogue raisonné as “his most exhibited, collected and best-known works” (op. cit.). The commercial success of his previous Unfurled works allowed him to finally invest in top quality materials, fastidiously selecting the specific paint and canvas which he would use. He decided on the new Bocour Magna acrylics invented by Leonard Bocour after corresponding with Bocour to learn of the paint’s specifications. This new line of acrylics utilized a particularly transparent resin which allowed Louis to apply the paint with a opacity clearer than the highest grade of optical glass, imparting a luminosity and depth of color heretofore unimaginable, attaining an astonishing affect in which the colors seem to glow from within. Louis likely thinned his pigment with turpentine, then methodically applied each liquid color to the canvas using a long stick wrapped in cheesecloth; this inventive applicative method allowed louis to completely saturate each fiber of the cotton canvas while preventing any signs visible of application. The effect creates a completely smooth canvas which harmonizes the painted and unpainted areas of the work, further emphasizing the unpainted canvas as an active compositional element rather than a mere neutral carrier of color. Louis’s extension of the deep indigo stripe past the other colors to the top of the canvas further articulates this effect, establishing a compositional asymmetry to the otherwise balanced work, granting the work a structural dynamism which heightens the interplay between painted and unpainted surface.
The Stripe series was first exhibited to the public in the autumn of 1961 at André Emmerich Gallery in New York, receiving great critical acclaim. Brian O’Doherty praised Louis’s “intelligence and invention” in the New York Times, delighting in how “bands jostle, squeeze, push and argue with each other, giving the pillar considerable optical excitement…this is an attempt of rare intelligence to exploit visual phenomena through color” (B. O’Doherty, “Art: Three Creators of Clear Illusions,” New York Times, 5 October 1961, p. 34). Pillar of Celebration is one of the earliest and largest paintings in the Stripe series, made before Louis began scaling down the works after the André Emmerich exhibition. The work is similarly one of the select few from the series to have been sold or exhibited before the artist’s death; Louis only titled and stretched his work to his exacting specifications when it left his studio, and as such left a large number of his oeuvre unstretched and untitled to his estate. Pillars of Celebration comprises one of the most significant examples from one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic and seminal artists, treasured by the century’s most influential critics. This bold and pioneering work laid the foundation for the development of minimalism and Color Field painting, a swan song conveying Morris Louis’s innovative conceptions to a new generation of artists.
A beam of chromatic intensity arranged as a tight bundle of luminous colors, Pillar of Celebration constitutes a critical example from renowned Color Field artist Morris Louis’s Stripe series. Painted immediately following the Unfurled series, the Stripe paintings mark the culmination of Louis’s career, synthesizing the figural component of his Veil series with the colorism of the Unfurled series to realize a revolutionary epitome in the artist’s distinctive artistic language. Among the artist’s greatest and most coveted works, this series was executed just prior to Louis’s untimely demise from lung cancer in September of 1962, marking the premature denouement of the artist’s incredible practice just as he reached the height of his powers, finally attaining critical and commercial success.
In Pillar of Celebration, Louis choreographs a particularly rich and dynamic composition, with ten stripes of vibrant colors extending down the canvas, comingling at the edges into a singular expressive form expressive of a quiet monumentality. Louis uses his stripes here to cauterize the picture pane, imposing an apparent velocity onto the composition where the magisterial juxtaposition of the differing hues, values, intensities, and temperatures of the chosen colors establish a plenitude of experiences singularly evocative of pictorial space. Thus, Louis is able to irradicate all traditional elements of painting from his canvas, isolating color alone in his composition. Louis completes the artistic revolution against Cubism and figuration first initiated by the Abstract Expressionists, demonstrating how a pure abstracted picture could be made solely through the pursuit of color, pioneering the language of minimalism and Color Field painting which would come to dominate the 1960s.
The great art critic Clement Greenberg discovered Morris Louis and became his most ardent champion and confidant, advising the artist on his work, introducing him to artists and gallerists, and curating his shows. Upon seeing the first of the Stripe series in April 1961, Greenberg heralded the works’ technical virtuosity and formal aestheticism, giving the series the name “Pillars of Fire” and writing to Louis how “as usual, your works continue to haunt me. But first time I felt they were beyond my eye for the time being. Which, for me, meaning everything “ (C. Greenberg, letter to Morris Louis, 23 March 1962, quoted in Diane Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, cat. rais., 1985, p. 29). Upon Louis’s request, Greenberg also provided the titles to many of the works in the series sold before the artist’s passing. Utterly infatuated with the artist’s series, Greenberg chose Pillars of Celebration out of the examples Louis presented to purchase directly from the artist for his personal collection, endorsing the work as one of the best examples of the series.
In early 1961 Louis began to work on the Stripe paintings, described in the artist’s catalogue raisonné as “his most exhibited, collected and best-known works” (op. cit.). The commercial success of his previous Unfurled works allowed him to finally invest in top quality materials, fastidiously selecting the specific paint and canvas which he would use. He decided on the new Bocour Magna acrylics invented by Leonard Bocour after corresponding with Bocour to learn of the paint’s specifications. This new line of acrylics utilized a particularly transparent resin which allowed Louis to apply the paint with a opacity clearer than the highest grade of optical glass, imparting a luminosity and depth of color heretofore unimaginable, attaining an astonishing affect in which the colors seem to glow from within. Louis likely thinned his pigment with turpentine, then methodically applied each liquid color to the canvas using a long stick wrapped in cheesecloth; this inventive applicative method allowed louis to completely saturate each fiber of the cotton canvas while preventing any signs visible of application. The effect creates a completely smooth canvas which harmonizes the painted and unpainted areas of the work, further emphasizing the unpainted canvas as an active compositional element rather than a mere neutral carrier of color. Louis’s extension of the deep indigo stripe past the other colors to the top of the canvas further articulates this effect, establishing a compositional asymmetry to the otherwise balanced work, granting the work a structural dynamism which heightens the interplay between painted and unpainted surface.
The Stripe series was first exhibited to the public in the autumn of 1961 at André Emmerich Gallery in New York, receiving great critical acclaim. Brian O’Doherty praised Louis’s “intelligence and invention” in the New York Times, delighting in how “bands jostle, squeeze, push and argue with each other, giving the pillar considerable optical excitement…this is an attempt of rare intelligence to exploit visual phenomena through color” (B. O’Doherty, “Art: Three Creators of Clear Illusions,” New York Times, 5 October 1961, p. 34). Pillar of Celebration is one of the earliest and largest paintings in the Stripe series, made before Louis began scaling down the works after the André Emmerich exhibition. The work is similarly one of the select few from the series to have been sold or exhibited before the artist’s death; Louis only titled and stretched his work to his exacting specifications when it left his studio, and as such left a large number of his oeuvre unstretched and untitled to his estate. Pillars of Celebration comprises one of the most significant examples from one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic and seminal artists, treasured by the century’s most influential critics. This bold and pioneering work laid the foundation for the development of minimalism and Color Field painting, a swan song conveying Morris Louis’s innovative conceptions to a new generation of artists.