Morris Louis

André Emmerich Gallery, Inc., New York
Robert A. Rowan, Pasadena
Sotheby's, New York, November 18, 1999, lot 369
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
Galerie Guy Ledune, Brussels
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2001

San Francisco Museum of Art, American Art of the Sixties, June - July 1967
Seattle Art Museum, Morris Louis: Veils and Unfurleds, July - August 1967, cat. no. 21, illustrated in color
Pasadena Art Museum, Selections from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Rowan, September - November 1970
Pasadena Art Museum, Post-1950 Paintings, July - September 1972
Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, A Look at New York, June - July 1973 
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Selections from the Rowan Collection, November 1974

Daniel Mendelowitz, A History of American Art, New York, 1970, p. 456, illustrated
Diane Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, New York, 1985, cat. no. 332, p. 163, illustrated in color

This work is in good condition overall. Please refer to the attached report prepared by Amann + Estabrook Conservation Associates. Please note that this work is 105 by 144 ½ inches wide, not as stated in the printed catalogue.
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.

The layers of translucent color that spread across this painting place Alpha Iota at the pinnacle of Morris Louis's mature achievement. Turning away from the gesture-laden, textured surfaces that typified much of Abstract Expressionist painting, Alpha Iota displays colors flowing effortlessly, breathing life across this vast canvas. The gradations of hues create a lustrous kaleidoscope of color. After Morris Louis's Veil paintings, the artist developed his well-known pouring technique in a series of works known as the Unfurled  paintings such as Alpha Iota in 1960-1961. In these works, Louis poured lines of pure color across the outer perimeter of the painting, leaving the center bare. This became known as the "one-shot" technique because the artist had only one attempt at a successful pour. These lines stress the painting's flatness, leading the eye across and out of its surface. This process denies any reading of the painting as an image to be looked into, and insists on its reality as non-representative object.

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. Clement Greenberg, arguably the most influential art critic of the time, met Louis in 1953 and promoted his work in writings and exhibitions. For the remainder of his career, Louis only spoke painting to one person: Greenberg.

Louis banished tactility, exposing the weave of the canvas and even the constituent parts of the paint. He left large areas of canvas primed, but unpainted. Using acrylic paint, he adapted and flattened the gesture of the 50s, underplaying its calligraphic potential and emphasizing its similarity to elementary mark-making. By tilting a large canvas, then flooding it with separate waves of acrylic paint thinned with turpentine, Louis detached painting from drawing. There is no graphic structure, no armature or lines in these works, only waves of overlapping color. The painting appears to be illuminated from within.

In Alpha Iota, six bands of mobile color extend from the top corners of the massive canvas down towards the bottom, leaving a swelling void of canvas in the center of the work. The ribbons of color in their viscous materiality absorbed into the canvas flow along the picture's edges. Two simple forms appear, roughly the same: each consisting of six drips the shape of a dog's hind leg running diagonally down each side, angled to vaguely parallel each other. These ribbons mirror each other in hues, yet drape in different orders on either side of the mural-sized canvas. Two bands of bright yellow contrast a dark black, rusty red, faded purple and distant orange. 

This work, as with all of the Unfurled paintings, refutes the bonding of two parts to form a whole. Indeed, the two halves of the work, and the stripes within those edges, remain unbound by the painter's hand, with a void at the center. 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.

Unfurled was the name Greenberg attached to these works, as if flags were being caught by the wind or curtains were being pulled. Fitting with this hesitation towards imposed meaning, Louis expressed minimal interest in titling his pictures. The titles are based on the system developed posthumously under which Veils are assigned with Hebrew letters, Unfurleds with Greek letters – thus Alpha Iota. The pictures are titled arbitrarily, in the order of their being stretched. This identification circumvented literary or idea overtones or titles with meaningful associations.

The virtuosity of Louis's technique is demonstrated in full force here, in both the clarity of color and the way it seems almost disembodied, not mitigated by brushwork or any other signs of the artist's hand. 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, most likely a result of his prolific use of turpentine and other resin thinners for his paints. However, in Louis's brief yet inspirational career, he left, with works such as Alpha Iota, an indelible mark on his contemporaries and upon the public's ability to comprehend a pared down art of minimal components – an art which would flourish in the following decade.