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Morris Louis – American abstract expressionist painter

Morris Louis born in Morris Louis Bernstein, on 28 November 1912 was an American abstract expressionist painter. In the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.

He returned to his native Baltimore in 1940 and taught privately and in 1948, he pioneered the use of Magna paint a newly developed oil based acrylic paint made for him by his friends, New York City paint makers Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden. During the 1950s he and a group of artists that included Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Tom Downing, Howard Mehring and Anne Truitt, among others were central to the development of Color Field painting.

Louis destroyed many of his paintings between 1955 and 1957 and resumed work on the Veils in 1958–59. All these were followed by Florals and Columns, Unfurleds in which rivulets of more opaque, intense color flow from both sides of large white fields of raw canvas and finally the Stripe paintings.

The basic point about Louis's work and that of other Color Field painters, sometimes known as the Washington Color School in contrast to most of the other new approaches of the late 1950s and early 1960s, is that they greatly simplified the idea of what constitutes the look of a finished painting.

Morris Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1962 and soon after, died at his home in Washington, D.C., on September 7, 1962. the cause of which was attributed to prolonged exposure to paint vapours. A memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in 1963.