 Morris Louis (American, 1912–1962)
Turning, 1958
Acrylic resin paint on canvas
Purchase with Academy funds and funds from
Academy Volunteers, 1971 (3997.1)
In the mid-1950s, Morris Louis abandoned his early
interests in easel painting and Cubism to lay his
canvases, unstretched and unprimed, on the floor and
pour onto them washes of acrylic paint. Over the next
several years Lewis refined this distinctly personal
approach to abstraction, painting numerous enormous
canvases that are lyrical, even mystical, in mood. One
in a series of paintings called Veils, this work is
composed of plumes of rich earth tones, which are
stained one over the other, wet on wet, and absorbed
by the weave of the raw canvas. Dark reds, pale olives,
and moss greens flow downwards, warmed by an
underlying incandescent red-orange. The layered, or
laminated, effect seems to shift before the viewer's eye.
Louis was interested in "all-over" painting (later called
"Color Field Painting"), which emphasizes the surface
of the canvas and the validity of paint itself. |