Unfurled Banners

To many of his suburban Washington, D.C., acquaintances in the 1950s, Morris Louis Bernstein was simply a peevish, chain-smoking, introverted art teacher. About all the world knew was that he was married to a high school principal, never discussed what he was doing during the eleven hours and more a day that he spent in his studio. One of the few painters who gained admission to his inner sanctum reported with awe, "There isn't a goddam brush in the place." Nonetheless, under his painting name of Morris Louis, Bernstein gained a reputation in Manhattan art circles. Since his death from lung cancer in 1962 at the age of 49, his repute has grown to major proportions.

This spring Morris Louis exhibitions have been popping up like crocuses. Manhattan's Andre Emmerich Gallery showed eight of Louis' last canvases in March, sold almost all of them at prices up to $15,000; Washington's Gallery of Modern Art is staging a retrospective with 15 more. The largest retrospective (see color opposite), made up of 54 canvases assembled by Harvard's teacher-critic Michael Fried, opens at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts this week, after having appeared at the Los Angeles County Museum.

What is remarkable about Louis' canvases is their simplicity. They are devoid of any recognizable form; color is forced to carry the burden of Louis' whole message. He was a cubist and linear abstractionist for most of his life, but on a 1953 visit to New York, he saw Abstractionist Helen Frankenthaler experimenting with poured paint. Captivated, he abandoned brushes altogether, began thinning his paint, allowing it to wash in great waves down huge canvases. The resulting panoramas became his celebrated "veils of color."

From his earliest veils, Louis progressed to more complicated "floral" patterns, then to what many admirers consider his most sophisticated works. These are known as Louis' "unfurleds": irregular zebra stripes placed in such a way that they seem to almost tear the canvas apart with their decisiveness. In the 1960s, he turned to narrow, bold, successive rows of vertical stripes. Just before he died, Louis began to stretch and frame his canvases so that the stripes ran diagonally, sprinting tensely upwards, onwards and off at the corners. Mute and vibrant, they hang stiffly like heraldic banners for some brave new world.

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