Morris Louis

Born Morris Louis Bernstein in Washington, D.C., in 1912, Louis legally dropped his last name in 1938. He studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts in Baltimore, and then assisted in painting Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals in Baltimore public schools. Between 1936 and 1940, Louis lived in New York and attended the workshops of David Alfaro Siqueiros. In the early 1950s, Louis moved back to Washington, D.C., and devoted himself to developing a response to the New York School of abstract painters. After seeing the stained canvases of Helen Frankenthaler, Louis began to create a series of paintings using a similar technique. These large paintings, that form the core of Louis's oeuvre, are divided into groups: "veils" (1954), "veils II" (1958-59), "unfurled" (1959-61), and "stripes" (1961-62). After the artist's death in 1962, the critic Clement Greenberg named him a proponent of "post-painterly abstraction," in an exhibition of the same name held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964.