Untitled 1960

Morris Louis created this untitled work, using acrylic on canvas, sometime before his death in 1962. Louis was associated with Color Field painting, a movement arising out of abstract expressionism in the United States. The image is created from translucent washes of color, staining the canvas rather than sitting on its surface. Note the ways the colors blend, creating new tones and hues where they overlap. As well as its aesthetic qualities, the image raises questions about the institutions of art themselves. The critic Clement Greenberg championed Color Field painting, and particularly artists like Louis, seeing in it a purely visual art, free from narrative content. Yet, can art ever really be 'free' of cultural context? What does it mean when critics and institutions elevate some art and not others? To understand Louis's work better, we need to look into the critical debates of the time, and to ask what social function art was expected to perform.