- Clement Greenberg ‘Louis And Noland’ Art International Vol. 4, May 1960, pp26-9; reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays And Reviews: Volume 4: Modernism With A Vengeance 1957–1969 (ed. John O'Brien) University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993, p98.
- Daniel Robbins ‘Morris Louis: Triumph Of Color’ Art News Vol. 62, No. 2, October 1963, p29.
- Howard Singerman ‘Noncompositional Effects, Or The Process Of Painting In 1970’ Oxford Art Journal Vol. 26, No. 1, 2003, p132.
- Singerman suggests that ‘composition is an intended, ordered relationship of discrete parts, a relationship that suggests—that at once builds and needs—an interiority, a solid, plotted depth that fills both the artist as intentional actor and the visual field, however flat, that underpins the painting: one is an analogue for the other.’ Ibid, p132.
- Daniel Robbins ‘Morris Louis: Triumph Of Color’ op cit, p57.
- New exposure of Louis's paintings, through exhibitions such as the retrospective Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited (High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2006) continues to raise awareness of Louis's investigations into his medium. As a result, there has recently been an increased possibility for Louis's work to branch into new contexts. Alexander Nemerov, for example, in ‘Morris Louis: Court Painter To The Kennedy Era’ (Morris Louis: An American Master Revisited High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2006, pp 21–38) links the formal concerns of colour field painting with the changing political situation in the United States leading into the 1960s. Other notable research into the medium and the idiosyncratic techniques of major American painters of the period such as Louis include the Getty Conservation Institute project on modern paints led by Dr Tom Learner, Head of Contemporary Art Research. For an in-depth analysis of Louis's use of Magna acrylic pigment see Jo Crook and Tom Learner The Impact Of Modern Paints Tate, London, 2000. Magna was an acrylic resin pigment developed by New York manufacturer Leonard Bocour in 1947, marketed as ‘the first new painting medium in 500 years’ (p26). Bocour was well known during the 1930s and 1940s for providing New York artists such as Louis and Barnett Newman with left over paint samples. Several others experimented with the medium during the 1950s, such as Robert Rauschenberg. The benefits of Magna included faster drying times than oils and brilliant colour resolution, even when thinned. However, unlike with oils, the paint layers remained soluble if unvarnished. As dry pigment layers could be easily dissolved, Magna was difficult for some artists to use. Louis came to exploit this feature, particularly in his Veils (p26).
- David Carrier (reviewing Morris Louis: An American Master Revisited) ‘Morris Louis’ Artforum January 2007, p256.
- See Diane Upright Headley ‘In Addition To The Veils’ Art In America Vol. 66, No. 1, January-February 1978, p84.
- Due to the large scale of his paintings (ranging from three to seven metres long) and the small size of his studio (3.6 × 4.3 metres), a converted dining room, Louis's only opportunity to see his works properly was in exhibition. In conversation with Marcella Louis Brenner and Chevy Chase, Maryland, Washington D.C., November 2002. See also Diane Upright ‘The Technique Of Morris Louis’ Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonnè Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1985, p58, fn8.
- Morris Louis, letter to Joseph Bernstein, 31 October 1941; reprinted in Diane Upright Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings pp 21–2.
- In the essay ‘The Situation At The Moment’ (Partisan Review Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1948) Greenberg stated that ‘the American artist has to embrace and content himself, almost, with isolation if he is to give the most honesty, seriousness, and ambition to his work. Isolation is, so to speak, the national condition of high art in America’. (p82). Bradford R. Collins elaborates upon the complexities of the ‘bohemian’ disdain of the American artists towards mainstream cultural interests in the essay ‘Life Magazine And The Abstract Expressionists, 1948–51: A Historiographic Study Of A Late Bohemian Enterprise’ The Art Bulletin Vol. 73, No. 2, June 1991, pp 280–308.
- Adolf Gottlieb ‘Artist And Society: A Brief Case History’ College Art Association Annual Meeting (1954), quoted in Bradford R. Collins ‘Life Magazine And The Abstract Expressionists’ op cit, p295.
- Elizabeth C. Baker intelligently notes that ‘through his well-known critic and artist friends, Louis had direct access to advanced New York ideas which many New Yorkers didn't.’ ‘Morris Louis: Veiled Illusions’ Art News April 1970, p36.
- See Diane Upright ‘The Practice Of Morris Louis’ Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné p35 onwards.
- Clement Greenberg ‘Louis And Noland’ op cit, pp95–6.
- Ibid, p97.
- Clement Greenberg ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960) reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays And Reviews: Volume 4 op cit, p89.
- Morris Louis, letter to Clement Greenberg, 1 June 1954, cited in Dean Swanson Morris Louis: The Veil Cycle Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 1977, p32.
- Clement Greenberg ‘The Crisis Of the Easel Picture’ (1948) Art And Culture: Critical Essays Beacon Press, Boston, third edition, 1968, p157.
- Ibid, p157.
- Ibid.
- In ‘Louis And Noland’, Greenberg would come to state that: ‘[Louis's] first sight of the middle-period Pollocks and of a large and extraordinary painting done in 1952 by Helen Frankenthaler, called Mountains And Sea, led Louis to change his direction abruptly. Abandoning Cubism with a completeness for which there was no precedent in either influence, he began to feel, think, and conceive almost exclusively in terms of open colour.’ (p96.)
- Greenberg included both paintings in the Emerging Talent group exhibition at Samuel Kootz Gallery, New York, January 1954; Louis's first showing in New York since the 1930s.
- Clement Greenberg ‘Feeling Is All’ Partisan Review Vol. 19, January-February 1952, p102.
- Lee Krasner Pollock comments that ‘many of the most abstract, began with more or less recognizable imagery—heads, parts of the body, fantastic creatures. Once I asked Jackson why he didn't stop the painting when a given image was exposed. He said, “I choose to veil the imagery.”’ Lee Krasner interviewed by B. H. Friedman ‘An Interview With Lee Krasner Pollock’ reprinted in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles And Reviews Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999, p34.
- Clement Greenberg ‘Feeling Is All’ op cit, p102.
- Clement Greenberg ‘Preface’ Art And Culture: Critical Essays op cit, np.
- Clement Greenberg ‘“American-Type” Painting’ (1958) Art And Culture: Critical Essays op cit, p227.
- Barnett Newman: First Retrospective Exhibition Bennington College, Vermont, 4–24 May 1958; Barnett Newman: A Selection 1946–1951 French and Company, New York, 11 March—5 April 1959.
- Thomas B. Hess spoke against Newman's 1950 and 1951 exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery, which contributed to Newman's exile from exhibiting in New York until his 1959 show at French and Company, curated by Greenberg. With regard to the 1950 exhibition, Hess stated: ‘Newman is out to shock, but he is not out to shock the bourgeoisie—that has been done. He likes to shock other artists.’ Thomas B. Hess, ‘Barnett Newman’ Art News Vol. 49, No. 1, March 1950, p48. The critic again denounced works in Newman's 1951 exhibition in ‘Reviews And Previews: Barnett Newman’ Art News Vol. 50, Summer 1951, p49.
- Clement Greenberg ‘Introduction’ Barnett Newman: First Retrospective Exhibition; reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays And Reviews: Volume 4 op cit, p54.
- In the 1955 version of ‘“American-Type” Painting’, Greenberg spoke of Newman's work in relation to Rothko and Still on the subject of technique. He stated that Rothko ‘too is a brilliant colorist; like Newman, he soaks his pigment into the canvas, getting a dyer's effect, and does not apply it as a discrete covering layer in Still's manner’ (p193). Following the publication of the essay, Newman responded to Greenberg that: ‘You know that my paint quality is heavy, solid, direct, the opposite of a stain.’ Barnett Newman, letter to Clement Greenberg, 1955; quoted in Ann Temkin ‘Barnett Newman On Exhibition’ Barnett Newman Philadelphia Museum of Art and Tate Modern, London, 2002, p54. Despite the obvious rejection of this description, Greenberg retained his comments on Newman's technique in the revised essay and in 1958 he wrote that: ‘Like Newman (though it is Rothko who probably did the influencing here), he [Rothko] seems to soak his paint into the canvas to get a dyer's effect and avoid the connotations of a discrete layer of paint on top of the surface.’ Clement Greenberg ‘“American-Type” Painting’ op cit, p225.
- John Elderfield attributes some of the interest in ‘abstract impressionism’ to the purchase of Claude Monet's late Nymphéas (Waterlilies) by the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. See John Elderfield Morris Louis Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986, p21.
- In an open defence of his position on Louis's ‘experimental’ works, and against new researchers such as Diane Upright, Greenberg claimed that Louis's remaining paintings from 1955–7 that were not destroyed by the artist during the period ‘survived only because he'd become so immersed in making that he no longer got around to destroying’. Clement Greenberg ‘Letter To The Editor’ Art In America Vol. 66, No. 2, March—April 1978, p5. This letter was written in response to Diane Upright's article on Louis's lesser known series in ‘In Addition To The Veils’ op cit, pp84–94.
- Clement Greenberg ‘Louis And Noland’ op cit, p96.
- In correspondence accompanying a shipment of ten Veil paintings from his 1954 series, Louis commented on two works that caught his interest: ‘In my mind two of them are different than the continuity of simple pattern and slow motion of the majority. These two are the rougher ones with lots of black and white areas. Maybe these are lousy enough to interest me now and make me want to explore this further. The others I feel I've done all I feel like doing about that episode.’ These works would become the basis for Louis's 1955–7 series. See Morris Louis, letter to Clement Greenberg, 6 June 1954, reprinted in Diane Upright Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings op cit, p15.
- Suggestions of a brace used by Louis in the construction of his late Veil paintings originates with research by Diane Upright in ‘Documentation: The Veil Paintings’ Morris Louis: The Veil Cycle op cit, p24. Upright acknowledges common interpretations that the effect was achieved by Louis folding his canvases due to the small size of his studio, which were subsequently raised by John Elderfield, curator of Morris Louis (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986). However, her proposal is in line with conservation research conducted by the Tate Modern from 2000, in which detailed photographs in raking light show the imprints left by a wooden form on Louis's canvases. See The Impact Of Modern Paints op cit, p130. Upright proposes that the imprint is evident in over 50 of Louis's late Veils. Furthermore, there are many works of the same size as these ‘triadic’ Veils which do not show the bracing marks, suggesting they could not have been simply due to the restrictions of the size of the canvas (Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings op cit, p54). One conclusion from this research is that Louis used the brace marks to create compositional variance in his late Veils.
- Critics such as E.A. Carmean, writing in 1976 on Louis's Stripe series, suggested that Louis's ‘chromatic deftness’ and ‘strict geometric composition’ were enhanced by the fact that the works appeared ‘without a transitional period such as those which had accompanied Louis's earlier changes of style and format. E.A. Carmean Jr. ‘Morris Louis And The Modern Tradition VI: Principles Of Abstraction’ Arts Magazine Vol. 51, No. 4, 1976, p116. Diane Upright confronts this view by taking up many of Louis's lesser known series in her essay ‘In Addition To The Veils’ op cit.
- Clement Greenberg ‘Modernist Painting’ op cit, p90.
- Recent authors who have questioned the distinction between the ‘eye’ and the ‘body’ in Greenberg's criticism include Caroline A. Jones and Marcia Brennan. See Caroline A. Jones Eyesight Alone University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2005; and Marcia Brennan ‘How Formalism Lost Its Body But Kept Its Gender: Frankenthaler, Louis And Noland In The Sixties’ Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, The New York School And Post-Painterly Abstraction MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp116–51. Brennan's essay explores opticality as a specifically ‘masculine’ theory, taking the work of Helen Frankenthaler as an intermediate reference between Pollock and Louis. She suggests that ‘formalist criticism intrinsically needed the body that it continually sought to deny, as modernist paintings in their sensuous materiality were repeatedly made to function as analogues of embodied experience itself.’ (p150.)
- Caroline A. Jones Eyesight Alone op cit, p12.
- Michael Fried ‘Introduction’ Morris Louis 1912–1962 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1967, p9.
- Rosalind Krauss states that the Veil format ‘is horizontal; and the canting of the waves of colour slightly away from the vertical at the edges of the veil images acknowledges this format and its intrinsic horizontality. Thus from the start, Louis imbedded the release of color within a surface that was mural-like that was oriented to the wall in terms of it continuity and its resistance to being bounded or enframed.’ Rosalind Krauss Morris Louis Auckland City Art Gallery, 1971, unpaginated.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Volume 8, 2007 - Issue 1: Post-Medium