.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A monumental apparition spanning over thirteen feet in width, Gamma Upsilon stems from Morris Louis’ ground-breaking series of Unfurled paintings. Created between 1960 and 1961, as the artist took his place on the international stage, these works stand among his finest achievements, defined by their diagonal rivers of luminous colored bands. Cascading down the length of the canvas from the left and right edges, and broadening out towards the center, a flickering spectrum of orange, yellow, green, blue and black unfurls across the present work’s steep gradients, working in counterpoint with the weave of the fabric. Each titled with Greek letters, in the order of being stretched, the Unfurleds represent some of the most virtuosic instances of Louis’s celebrated “staining” technique, in which he applied thinned-out color to unprimed cotton. By allowing it to soak into the raw texture of the canvas, he shed new light on painting’s materiality, stripping the medium back to its most elemental ingredients. The present work was included in the artist’s major 1971 touring exhibition, which traveled across America, Australia and New Zealand, and was illustrated on the cover of the show’s catalogue. Other examples from the series now reside in institutions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Coming to prominence during the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Louis was championed by the influential critic Clement Greenberg, whom he met through his friend and fellow artist Kenneth Noland in 1953. During the pair’s visit to New York that year, Greenberg introduced Louis to the work of Franz Kline and Helen Frankenthaler: that weekend, he also saw Jackson Pollock’s works in the flesh for the first time. Though particularly impressed by the raw energy and vast scale of the drip paintings, it was Frankenthaler’s large, stained canvases—notably the 1953 work Mountains and Sea—that arguably had the biggest impact on his oeuvre. Upon his return to Washington, D.C., Louis began to experiment with unprimed canvas, applying deliberately thinned acrylic pigment that absorbed directly into the fabric like a dye. Working without a brush, the artist would lean his canvas against the wall, allowing paint to spill down the length of the picture plane. Where much Abstract Expressionist rhetoric had emphasized the primacy of the artist’s hand and psyche, Louis’s works took on a new sense of autonomous freedom. The basic crux of art making—namely, the alchemical interaction between pigment and canvas—was exposed in its most raw state, captured in the mysterious, incandescent moment of ignition.
Following on from his major early series of Veils, the Unfurleds emerged during a breakthrough period for Louis. In January 1960, the critic and scholar William Rubin—subsequently a curator and director at The Museum of Modern Art, New York—praised the artist in an essay entitled “Younger American Painters” in Art International, naming his recent exhibition of Veils as “one of the most significant in years” (“Younger American Painters,” Art International, January 1960, p. 28). Rubin’s brother Lawrence started to promote the artist’s paintings in Europe and, under a new partnership with the dealer André Emmerich in America, Louis's works began to achieve financial as well as critical success. That same year, Greenberg himself published a major assessment of Louis’s work, also in Art International, exalting the artist’s technique and concluding that his work stood on a par with the early pioneers of Abstract Expressionism. “The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, color in itself, like a dyed cloth: the threadedness and wovenness are in the color,” he explained. “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” (“Louis and Noland,” Art International, May 1960, p. 28).
The present work sits at a crucial juncture in the Unfurleds, capturing the moment at which the signature formations began to solidify. While many of the early works in the cycle featured broad strokes of color, organized in a variety of patterns, Gamma Upsilon marks the artist’s transition towards thin rivulets that flowed from opposing corners of the canvas. This strategy would come to define the series, distinguished by steep, vertiginous banks of color flanking a triangular expanse of bare linen. Louis’s debt to the palettes of Post-Impressionism is evident in the present work’s vivid hues, evoking the luminous tonalities of Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne. As E.A. Carmean has written, “We experience what we might call a ‘multitude of colors’ flowing inward from the exterior. Louis’s placement, drawing and color juxtaposition, all ingredients which alternately dominated one another in earlier works, are here made equal and mutually supportive. Like Pollock’s art, here what at first appears so strikingly simple is, in fact, astonishingly rich in its nuances … Louis himself considered these later Unfurleds his greatest works” (Morris Louis: Major Themes & Variations, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1976, n.p.). The present work stands as a reminder of this creative pinnacle: the zenith of a career that would be tragically cut short by the artist’s untimely death just two years later.
Coming to prominence during the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Louis was championed by the influential critic Clement Greenberg, whom he met through his friend and fellow artist Kenneth Noland in 1953. During the pair’s visit to New York that year, Greenberg introduced Louis to the work of Franz Kline and Helen Frankenthaler: that weekend, he also saw Jackson Pollock’s works in the flesh for the first time. Though particularly impressed by the raw energy and vast scale of the drip paintings, it was Frankenthaler’s large, stained canvases—notably the 1953 work Mountains and Sea—that arguably had the biggest impact on his oeuvre. Upon his return to Washington, D.C., Louis began to experiment with unprimed canvas, applying deliberately thinned acrylic pigment that absorbed directly into the fabric like a dye. Working without a brush, the artist would lean his canvas against the wall, allowing paint to spill down the length of the picture plane. Where much Abstract Expressionist rhetoric had emphasized the primacy of the artist’s hand and psyche, Louis’s works took on a new sense of autonomous freedom. The basic crux of art making—namely, the alchemical interaction between pigment and canvas—was exposed in its most raw state, captured in the mysterious, incandescent moment of ignition.
Following on from his major early series of Veils, the Unfurleds emerged during a breakthrough period for Louis. In January 1960, the critic and scholar William Rubin—subsequently a curator and director at The Museum of Modern Art, New York—praised the artist in an essay entitled “Younger American Painters” in Art International, naming his recent exhibition of Veils as “one of the most significant in years” (“Younger American Painters,” Art International, January 1960, p. 28). Rubin’s brother Lawrence started to promote the artist’s paintings in Europe and, under a new partnership with the dealer André Emmerich in America, Louis's works began to achieve financial as well as critical success. That same year, Greenberg himself published a major assessment of Louis’s work, also in Art International, exalting the artist’s technique and concluding that his work stood on a par with the early pioneers of Abstract Expressionism. “The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, color in itself, like a dyed cloth: the threadedness and wovenness are in the color,” he explained. “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” (“Louis and Noland,” Art International, May 1960, p. 28).
The present work sits at a crucial juncture in the Unfurleds, capturing the moment at which the signature formations began to solidify. While many of the early works in the cycle featured broad strokes of color, organized in a variety of patterns, Gamma Upsilon marks the artist’s transition towards thin rivulets that flowed from opposing corners of the canvas. This strategy would come to define the series, distinguished by steep, vertiginous banks of color flanking a triangular expanse of bare linen. Louis’s debt to the palettes of Post-Impressionism is evident in the present work’s vivid hues, evoking the luminous tonalities of Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne. As E.A. Carmean has written, “We experience what we might call a ‘multitude of colors’ flowing inward from the exterior. Louis’s placement, drawing and color juxtaposition, all ingredients which alternately dominated one another in earlier works, are here made equal and mutually supportive. Like Pollock’s art, here what at first appears so strikingly simple is, in fact, astonishingly rich in its nuances … Louis himself considered these later Unfurleds his greatest works” (Morris Louis: Major Themes & Variations, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1976, n.p.). The present work stands as a reminder of this creative pinnacle: the zenith of a career that would be tragically cut short by the artist’s untimely death just two years later.