About Morris Louis

  • Biography

    Born in Baltimore with the name of Morris Bernstein, Morris Louis, working from Washington DC, became a major figure in the mid 20th-century contemporary art scene on the East Coast. He was also a distinguished teacher. Louis is known for his drip paintings, the pouring of thinned acrylic paint onto unprimed or partially primed canvases. His later paintings had irregular stripes of bright colour, often overlapping and merging. He deliberately disassociated himself from the painterly-ness of the loaded brush of the abstract expressionists and pursuing his methods of using thinned paint was, along with Helen Frankenthaller, one of the key figures in the movement called Color Field painting.

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