Claustral (Primary Title)
Morris Louis, American, 1912 - 1962 (Artist)
“Tradition for a painter is an intolerable burden. To hold in one’s mind those great paintings of the past will inevitably cut off the spontaneous flow of creative ideas.” —Morris Louis
Louis explored pure color in his mature paintings, pouring paint onto unstretched, unprimed canvas. Here, he left the ends of the drips visible but situated them at the top rather than the bottom of the finished work. Louis cropped his canvases to create subtle asymmetries: this painting’s stripes fall slightly to the right of center, as do the stronger hues, creating a delicate tension and giving the sense that the painting expands to the left.
“Claustral,” like the word “cloister” from which it derives, can mean bar, bolt, or confining space. The title refers to the painting’s fencelike forms and perhaps to its feeling.
[1] The catalogue raisonne of paintings provides the provenance up to this point. No dates are provided. See Diane Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, a Catalogue Raisonne (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 229.
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