Morris Louis

Estate of the artist

André Emmerich Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in November 1991 by the present owner

New York, André Emmerich Gallery, Selected Works: From the Gallery's Collection, 1988, pl. 10, illustrated in color (on the cover) and n.p., illustrated in color

Scottsdale, Riva Yares Gallery, Morris Louis: Selected Paintings, 1958-62, 1989, no. 1, illustrated in color (on the cover)

New York, André Emmerich Gallery, The Great Decade: The 1960s, A Selection of Paintings and Sculpture, 1990, n.p., illustrated in color

Diane Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1985, no. 532 [ML 4-30], p. 181, illustrated in color; p. 234

Diane Upright, ed., Morris Louis, Baltimore, 2015 - ongoing, no. ML 4-30, illustrated in color, online (accessed: 13 October 2025)

A distinguished example from Morris Louis's celebrated series of Stripes, Polaris from 1962 captivates the viewer through its cascading bands of color and commanding vertical composition. In this work, Louis deftly bifurcates the unified column of pigment into two prismatic streams of varying width, producing a symphonic interplay of hue and rhythm. Bearing exceptional provenance, the present work has been held in the esteemed collection of Geri Brawerman for over three decades. The premise of these resplendent works was born of Louis's fastidious methodology, exploring methods of paint application in an effort to preserve the picture plane as a two-dimensional surface. The ultimate embodiment of his career-long pursuits, Louis' iconic Stripes were produced by the artist from 1961 until his untimely passing the following year. Testifying to the centrality of the Stripes within his practice, paintings of comparable scale to Polaris reside in major public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Radiant in both chromatic splendor and conceptual rigor, Polaris epitomizes the technical mastery and visual purity that define the triumph of Color Field painting and the enduring legacy of Morris Louis.

Louis developed his Stripes through a refined adaptation of Helen Frankenthaler’s staining technique, which he first encountered during a visit to her studio in 1952 with Kenneth Noland. In Polaris, the precision of the composition and the luminous saturation of pigment yield a work of striking visual immediacy. Upon witnessing Frankenthaler’s innovative method of pouring pigment over a flat, unstretched canvas to achieve a seamless stain, Louis famously described her as “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible." (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Morris Louis, 1986, p. 13) For Louis, one aspect of "what was possible" meant a total abandonment of gestural representation. For Louis, “what was possible” entailed a decisive departure from gestural representation. While Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, though fully abstract, retain a narrative quality as records of the artist’s physical movement and the passage of time, Louis’s works eschew this performative trace. In contrast to Pollock’s dynamic surfaces, Louis’s canvases possess a contemplative stillness, their impact derived from the immediacy of color and the quiet absence of gesture. The aesthetic force of Polaris resides precisely in this paradox: its capacity to evoke grandeur and emotion through restraint, order, and chromatic harmony.

Through the Stripes, Louis pursued a formalist investigation into the nature of the picture plane as an expansive, unified, and resolutely non-figurative field. Working with unprimed canvas often mounted directly to the wall, he poured highly diluted pigment in measured sequences, allowing gravity to guide the flow of color while maintaining rigorous compositional control. The result is a visual tension between natural descent and upward thrust, as the chromatic bands seem to rise against the gravitational pull that produced them. The paint, absorbed directly into the raw canvas, becomes inseparable from its support, thereby affirming the integrity and flatness of the surface. Though indebted to Frankenthaler’s staining technique, Louis’s vertical banding simultaneously recalls Barnett Newman’s iconic “zips,” invoking a dialogue between color, scale, and transcendence. The critic Clement Greenberg would later classify Louis’s work under the rubric of “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” a term describing artists who sought to temper the emotive intensity of Abstract Expressionism in favor of clarity, openness, and purity of color. Devoid of visible brushwork, Polaris exemplifies Louis’s methodical process of sequentially pouring synthetic acrylic resin paint to explore the optical relationships of hue. In these late works, Louis distilled abstraction to its essence—color, scale, and structure—anticipating the conceptual austerity of Minimalism while preserving the lyricism of Color Field painting.

Polaris stands as an unquestionable triumph of beauty, technical mastery, and meditative restraint, the apogee of Louis’s artistic pursuit. Writing to the artist in 1962, Clement Greenberg confessed, “As usual, your paintings continue to haunt me. But [for the] first time I felt they were beyond my eye for [the] time being. Which, for me, means everything.” (Clement Greenberg, “Letter to Morris Louis,” Morris Louis Archives, 23 March 1962). Greenberg’s words capture the ineffable resonance of Polaris, whose radiant immediacy and disciplined austerity transcend straightforward comprehension. The present work embodies the essential tenets that animated Louis’s brief yet pivotal career: the synthesis of color and surface, the pursuit of a wholly non-gestural abstraction, and the refinement of a pictorial language that unites rigor with lyricism.