Water-Shot

Helen Frankenthaler’s canny development of new working methods inspired other mid-century painters who were concerned less with artistic meaning and metaphor than with the formal and visual properties and processes of abstract painting. Morris Louis, a Washington, D.C.–based artist who was introduced to Frankenthaler by critic Clement Greenberg, took her staining process a step further, devising ways of soaking the canvas that involved neither brush nor gesture. By pouring Magna acrylic paint down the surface of a vertically tilted canvas and aggressively manipulating its flow with careful movements, he avoided any personal touch or texture that would divert attention from the purely optical effects and the resulting dynamic striations of color. Greenberg said about the method, “The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, color in itself.” Louis’s career was short, and he completed few series of paintings, although each was extraordinary in its own lyrical way. Water-Shot is from Stripes, his final series. Using nine hues to form the primary stripes, he achieved a complex chromatic range through overlaps and adjacencies, producing unexpected lushness with an economy of means.