Lot 221
  • 221

Morris Louis

Estimate
900,000 - 1,200,000 USD
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Description

  • Morris Louis
  • Gamma Kappa
  • signed and numbered #322 on the reverse
  • magna on canvas
  • 102 3/4 by 157 in. 261 by 399 cm.
  • Executed in 1960.

Provenance

André Emmerich Gallery, Inc., New York
Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome
Private Collection, Europe
Private Collection, Miami
Sotheby's, New York, May 15, 2008, lot 243
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Exhibited

New York, André Emmerich Gallery, Inc., Morris Louis: Unfurled Paintings - 1960, February - March 1970, n.p., illustrated in color

Literature

Diane Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, New York, 1985, no. 345, p. 164, ilustrated in color

Condition

This work is in very good condition overall. Please refer to the attached report prepared by Amann + Estabrook Conservation Associates. *Please note the auction begins at 9:30 am on November 14th.*
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

The layers of translucent color that spread flawlessly across this painting place Gamma Kappa at the pinnacle of Morris Louis's mature achievement. Turning away from the gesture-laden, textured surfaces that typified much of Abstract Expressionist painting, Gamma Kappa displays colors flowing effortlessly, breathing life literally into and across this vast canvas. The subtle gradations of hues create an image shimmering with a lustrous kaleidoscope of color.

A solitary, intensely self-critical man, Louis had by the early 1950s arrived at modest success as a painter and teacher in Washington D.C. Through a visit to Helen Frankenthaler's studio Louis was first exposed to her stained paintings, whose influence on his working methods and conception of painting was profoundly significant. This visit, as well as Louis's friendship with Kenneth Noland, spawned an exploration of different techniques of paint application, a style that would later be called Color Field Painting.  Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and the Abstract Expressionist movement further influenced Louis's development. Yet, Louis moved away from the unrestrained gesture to create pieces of deliberate fluid painting.

Working in a variety of series that included the dramatic pictorial solution of the Unfurled paintings (1960-61), of which this is a paramount example, and the later colorful, controlled and refined Stripe paintings (1961-62) Louis produced effects of incredible delicacy and subtlety.

Clement Greenberg, arguably the most influential art critic of the time, met Louis in 1953 and promoted his work in writings and exhibitions. Although Louis's art prior to their meeting was unexceptional, his earliest Veil paintings from 1954 represented a radical breakthrough. As Greenberg proclaimed, "Louis spills his paint on unsized and unprimed cotton duck canvas, leaving the pigment almost everywhere thin enough, no matter how many different veils of it are superimposed, for the eye to sense the threadedness and wovenness of the fabric underneath. But 'underneath' is the wrong word. The fabric being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, color in itself, like dyed cloth; the threadedness and wovennness are in the color." (Clement Greenberg as quoted in M. Fried, Morris Louis, New York, 1970)

Gamma Kappa of 1960 is an unrivalled work from the artist's Unfurled series and as such, of the artist’s oeuvre as a whole. Four bands of color seem to pour like ribbons, extending from the top corners of the massive eight-foot by thirteen-foot canvas down towards the bottom but never coalescing and leaving a swelling void of canvas in the center of the work. The ribbons of color in their viscous materiality absorbed into the canvas seem a freeze frame of the artist’s hand in the creation of the work. There is a very manifest expression of the self-evidence of the work’s fabrication in the gradations of the pigment as it flows from the edge of the canvas down towards its center. Louis has succinctly captured a particular essence of the man-made and yet his work simultaneously effaces its own moral seriousness, and temporal and mortal constructions. There is an undeniable integrity to the Unfurled series, which depends wholly on his ability to sublimate the instantaneity of the reading of what it is the viewer is observing. Whereas Pollock’s drips were loaded with the painter’s action, Louis’s stains reveal no evidence of struggle between the demands of art and of feeling.  There is no pictorial or aesthetic significance of the work’s construction. The beautiful wholeness is achieved in its immediacy of aesthetic revelation. 

Oddly enough, this work, as is true with all of the Unfurled series, refutes that most basic correlative of integrity, i.e. the bonding of two parts to form a whole. Indeed, the two halves of the work, and the stripes within those bounds, remain unbound by the painter’s hand. The rivulets of color cascading towards each other and that unknown terminus fail to bridge the divide. There is a seeming nothingness within Gamma Kappa, indeed the center of the canvas is literally blank.

The virtuosity of Louis's technique is demonstrated in full force here, in both the unprecedented clarity of color and the way it seems almost disembodied, not mitigated by brushwork or any other signs of the artist's hand. As Frank Stella once commented, Morris Louis was nearly the last abstract painter to hint at the potential that abstraction might have for creating a full and expansive pictorial space.  His achievements as one of the luminaries of Color Field painting are all the more astonishing in light of the fact that he created his rich body of work in less than a decade, as his life was tragically cut short in 1962.