The painter Morris Louis was born in Baltimore, where he attended the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1933. After four years living and working in New York, Louis returned to Baltimore to work as a private art instructor before making his final move to Washington, D.C., in 1952. The 1950s were pivotal for Louis’s career; he produced his most mature and celebrated works of art during this decade. While teaching at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts, Louis met fellow abstract painter Kenneth Noland, with whom he visited the studio of Helen Frankenthaler. Louis was profoundly inspired by Frankenthaler’s work and incorporated her method of staining canvases into his own process, producing the color-field paintings for which he is known today.
Freud says that primal anxiety was toxic, and that the primal limitation was of inspiration. If the anxiety of influence be imaged as a lack of breathing space, then the voluntary limitation that…
This illustration, from an antisemitic publication, Jüdische neue Zeitung vom Marsch aus Wien und anderen Orten der jetzigen zwölff Jüdischen Stammen (Jewish Newspaper from the March to Vienna and…
[By “war”] I mean concrete war—rather than a war of words or an incomplete war of demonstrations. I am not in denial regarding the existence of these words or those demonstrations, and neither do I…