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ArtFebruary 2007 Morris Louis reconsidered by Karen Wilkin On "Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. In a mature career of eight feverishly productive years, Morris Louis made an astonishing number of the most ravishing, mysterious, unyieldingly abstract paintings of the twentieth century. Between 1954 and his death, aged fifty, in 1962, Louis produced about six hundred large paintings composing the series known as Veils, Unfurleds, and Stripes, among others. These works are so authoritatively present that they compel our attention, and so disembodied that they appear to be pure essence. The confrontational Veils with their implacable “curtains” of layered hues, the tense Unfurleds with their wide-spaced cascades of clear chroma and empty centers, and the economical Stripes with their disciplined ranks of exuberant color, all seem based on a desire to reduce painting to its essentials without sacrificing its ability to stir us. Louis’s pictures test both the a ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 25 February 2007, on page 45 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/morris-louis-reconsidered-2587
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by Karen Wilkin On “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. by Karen Wilkin On “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900” at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. by Karen Wilkin On “Lois Dodd: Catching the Light” at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. On "Man Ray: Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery, London. by Mario Naves On "The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913” at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ. by James Panero On “Dana Gordon & John Mendelsohn: New Paintings” at Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, “Fedele Spadafora: New Paintings” at Slag Gallery, Brooklyn, and “John Dubrow: Recent Work” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art.
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