Susan Roth: Adventures with Morris Louis

‘We must look and look and look till we live the painting and for a fleeting moment become identified with it. If we do not succeed in loving what through the ages has been loved, it is useless to lie ourselves into believing that we do. A good rough test is whether we feel that it is reconciling us with life.’

Bernard Berenson¹Berenson, B., ‘Italian Painters of the Renaissance’, 1952

I first saw the paintings of Morris Louis at his memorial exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1963. Somehow, I had forgotten, until the moment when I pulled all the Louis books and catalogues off my shelf. Amongst them I found the catalogue of this exhibition.  Here I begin my search to understand my own statement: Louis is more radical than Pollock or Picasso.

My maternal grandfather was often charged with supervising my Saturdays, which was perfectly fine with the pair of us. We entered the Guggenheim Museum on that day in 1963. He paid, and as was our usual museum fashion, we began our walkabout, he doubling back and quickly exiting the building, leaving me to wander. We met up some hours later in the bookshop where he purchased the Louis catalogue for me. These forays were our secret.

I was very young then: however, the feeling of grandeur, the big fullness of feeling for Louis never left me. From this moment on, gazing at a Louis painting gave me a sense of permission that shifted my understanding: I began to feel anything might be possible. There are so many types of beauty, a sheer plurality of possibilities. Now, with this pile of pages at my feet, I began searching for my meaning and for the potential opportunities that Louis had revealed. 

In Lawrence Rubin’s interview for the film project, ‘Morris Louis: Radiant Zones’,²Withers Reporting Service, 1980 Rubin struggled, choosing his words carefully when retelling his own responses to inquiries made of Louis from interested collectors and artists. ‘Everyone looking at the pictures presumed Louis to be a happy man’, Rubin claims; in fact, we learn that Louis was ‘taciturn, very tough and not what you would call open.’  He was hard-working, focused and driven by fabulous integrity. Describing his visits to Louis’ studio, it seems that Rubin came to understand that what Louis was attempting to achieve, and the extent of his involvement with his materials, demanded extreme privacy. Sacrificing everything for passion, Louis was in fevered pursuit; creative success requires hard work. Here a new understanding of tradition emerged, of painting’s craft. Louis’ courage manifested itself in a committed form of living.

Like Giorgione before him, enigmatic figures both, they changed visual language and their pictures elude meaning. What we know is what they share: both painted in luminous colors, not dark/light (though Giorgione painted on dark grounds, Louis on unprimed canvas) neither artist relied upon the contrast between dark and light colours. With each there is no backdrop, the work and the viewer connect through a shared sense of intimacy and vulnerability. We feel the two painters’ sheer density of decisions. Inviting us into this intimacy completes the picture; the moment suspended as we sense this offering. Our gaze is slowed. The naturalness of each painter, the space felt between figures or events, remind us of what Berenson extolled of human experience: the ultimate test of reality, he claims, is touch, calling it ‘rendering tactile values in retinal images.’  We know this as what is called ‘hand’, the artist’s touch, changed by Giorgione and Louis- both forerunners of colour painting- and bringing about a fundamental shift in the art of painting. We witness this translation of sensation as our visual language changes, and our interpretation depends on our ability to see painting in this new paradigm. These artists set their pictures free by adding new visions from their studio practice. For those that follow, the struggle with the myth (that process is more important than product) renders process as both subject and content.

We know little about the handmaiden bringing change to Giorgione; we well know Louis’ apprenticeship. The best of writers (in English) have laid impressive groundwork for  our understanding of Louis’ art. Investigating my stack of books, I began a process of revisiting favorites: Lawrence Alloway,³My first catalogue, Guggenheim Museum, 1963 Michael Fried,⁴MFA Boston catalogue, 1967 and Dore Ashton.⁵Milan exhibition catalogue, 1990 It was re-reading John Elderfield⁶Hayward Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1974 that gave language to that which is central to my understanding of Louis, namely, my sense of the radical nature of his picture-making. For Elderfield, Louis ‘investigated the physical conditions of painting’s existence, inquired about the very identity of painting itself.’  Louis’ genius reinvented what painting is and might become. Louis built a visual language as abstract as music. 

I think now of my first investigations into paint’s physical properties, prompted by the need for materials that would facilitate my means.  In 1980 I called Sam Golden, Morris Louis’ paintmaker. I had read about the colourmen, the paintmakers for many past artists. Sam told me stories of his interactions with Louis whilst he reassured me that with patience, and the tinkerings of trials, he would fulfill my request for heavy, thick paint to hold the roiling surfaces I dreamed of. Sam shared stories of Louis’ need for particular viscosities, of Louis wanting more than stain, of Louis’ dream of canvas and color becoming one. Sam explained how Louis usually tacked unprimed cotton duck to stretchers or to lengths of wood and poured his paint, thinned Magna. We assume he tilted and manipulated this support: but what is seldom reported– and was explained to me by Sam– was Louis’ use of mineral spirits to break the surface tension of the canvas, a form of invisible drawing that offered some control and boundaries. All this to reassure me that we might find a way to make possible my dream of bunching and roiling of the picture plane or ground.

In an attempt to see Louis we must emancipate ourselves from a belief in the preconditions of luck. Our ability to see things anew depends upon our letting go of our assumptions of what freedom looks like. While it is true few are interested in the technical matters of art, these do have everything to do with art’s continuum and with its practitioners. Louis’ need for privacy, his reminding Sam not to give his paint formulations to anyone, his refusal to discuss his manipulation of the support, none of this has stopped us wanting to understand his practice, his completely abstract images. The difference between painter-as-example and painter-as-influence is so evident with Louis; thanks to his wild originality, you feel his example, his individual character. His influence is quite another matter: these visual works transcend understanding – they feel as inevitable as natural forces. His influence, like yeast, is everywhere and nowhere to be found.

Louis’ first major images emerged in 1954 as he was experimenting with formats and means to take advantage of the pouring of Magna. They present layers upon layers which, though weightless, leave the surface palpable. The ‘Veils’ format was one of the fruits of this early exploration, and, recognizing its power, in 1958 he began the series that bears the name. Frontal in character, and affected by the autonomy of each hue, these paintings of Louis’ offered a new view of abstractness and scale that surpassed Pollock’s openness, leaving all vestiges of cubism behind, and in so doing, changed our understanding of painting.  The scale, so difficult for his dealers to sell, comes from within all Louis’ images. As Colm Toibin says of Goya, Louis is ‘history charged’, his pushing of scale ‘a reflection coming from the inside out’, a very different proposition from size, which defines itself with numbers. However, the part-to-partness, the internal changes in scale, as Michael Fried reminded me in 1990 at Triangle Workshop, are as important to painting as to sculpture; when this internal context is everything, then size matters. I am reminded of Brancusi’s ‘Endless Column’; symmetry through repetition permits a sense of forever and ever, of infinity. The success of the ‘Unfurleds’ is the unbounded space within them. Like Chopin’s touch, in each rivulet, as fundamentally different as each finger, the character of colour remains singular and in concert with itself. This multiplicity retells our story. These complex paintings, with their new language, resist our comprehension; but while the commonplace nature of our vision seems to betray or forsake art, our experience broadens as we continue to gaze.

In revisiting Louis’ quest, we find the truth of it in the doing. He left us a broad vision. As my grandson sat with me last summer we opened Diane Upright’s Louis monograph, ‘The Complete Paintings’:

‘How would I know which one was my favourite?’ he asked.  So many look similar.’ ‘Of course, we are not in front of them’, I responded. (I thought of ‘The Book of the Thousand and One Nights’: it is all of them, taken together, that overtakes, transcends.)                    

‘Dashiell’, I continued, ‘It’s like loving ice cream. And ice cream we both know: another day, another favourite!’            

Art is not meant to stop the stream of life. Within a narrow span of duration and space the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition; and sometimes it marks the steps of progression, just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow windows that he is getting somewhere after all. 

Rudolf Arnheim⁷Arnheim, R., ‘Entropy and Art’, 1971