Number 99 1960

Morris Louis made this large canvas, *Number 99*, with acrylic on canvas. I can imagine him tilting, pouring, and coaxing those thin washes of color across the surface to create these veils and stains. Did he agonize over the composition? I wonder if he knew how the colors would interact, how they would layer and pool? I like the way the colors—yellow, red, blue, green—bleed into one another, creating new hues and tones. The shapes are organic and the edges soft, they remind me of a strange underwater garden. Look at the upper-right-hand corner, where a streak of transparent red overlaps a murky green to make something browner, darker, and more mysterious. Louis’s poured paintings were very different from the brushy abstractions of the New York School at the time. You could say they opened the way to a whole new kind of abstraction—one where the surface became more important than the gesture. All painters are in an ongoing conversation, inspiring one another’s creativity across time.