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.

They seduce us by the subtleties...

 

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