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Seeing Morris Louis Now.

Article Excerpt
Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited. Exhibition organized by Jeffrey D. Grove, High Museum of Art, Atlanta. High Museum of Art, November 4, 2006--January 24, 2007; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, February 17--May 6, 2007; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007--January 6, 2008.

Exh. cat. ed. Kelly Morris, Lori Cavagnaro, and Heather Medlock, with essays by Klaus Kertess, Alexander Nemerov, and Shepherd F. Steiner. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2006. 136 pp., 59 color ills., I b/w. $35

It is one of the great ironies of the painter Morris Louis's career that his strongest supporters left him marooned. For Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, Louis was the heir to Jackson Pollock and the next step in the modernist progression. "It is tempting to describe Louis's breakthrough" to the big stained canvases he began making in the mid-1950s "as one in which painting itself broke through to its future," Fried wrote in 1967, five years after Louis's death. (1) But it was not long before Louis and the painters the critics promoted in his wake--Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski--began to seem more like the end of painting than its future. The backlash against the formalist account of modernism in general and Color Field painting in particular left Louis in a critical limbo from which he has yet to escape.

The question now is whether there is any way to disentangle Louis from the script Greenberg and Fried wrote for him. Is there any other story of painting at the turn of the 1960s to which he might belong? Is it possible to think of his paintings as something other than elegant, elegiac footnotes to Abstract Expressionism's waning and Pop and Minimalism's rise?

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, noting a ripple of recent scholarly interest and having big, new special-exhibition galleries to fill, decided the time was right for another look. Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited opened there at the end of 2006 and closed early this year at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, with an interim stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The first large-scale exhibition since the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective twenty years earlier, it was an attempt to pull Louis out of the past tense and make him freshly available and debatable.

The painter did his part. Louis's paintings have a pristine, made-yesterday freshness; their acrylic colors are bright--at least where he did not veil them with a final dark wash--and their expanses of raw canvas remain with few exceptions creamy and unblemished. This is so despite the difficulty of conserving unprimed stained canvases, the subject of a supplement to the exhibition at the Hirshhorn, and despite the significance accorded decay by Shepherd Steiner in his essay in the accompanying catalogue.

The exhibition itself offered little that was new. Nothing in the selection of paintings, the predictable wall texts, or the "American Master" of the title suggested more than a re-presentation on the order of the 1986 MoMA retrospective, which proceeded as if the critical ground had not shifted under Louis. The High curator, Jeffrey D. Grove, left the rethinking of Louis to the catalogue, a compendium of disparate reassessments, all at some angle to the formalist account, but none that might stand as a text for the exhibition.

Even a cursory flip through its pages suggested that at least in the catalogue Louis's work would...

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