Louis, Morris (1912 - 1962)

Born in Baltimore, Morris Louis was a major figure in the mid 20th-century contemporary art scene in New York City. He is known for his drip paintings, the pouring of thinned acrylic paint onto unprimed or partially primed canvases. His later paintings had irregular stripes of bright colour, often overlapping and merging. He deliberately disassociated himself from the painterliness of the loaded brush of the abstract expressionists and pursuing his methods of using thinned paint was, along with Helen Frankenthaller, one of the key figures in the movement called Color Field painting. He studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Art in Baltimore and then worked in New York as a WPA artist. At that time he changed his name from Morris Bernstein. He returned to Baltimore briefly before settling in Washington DC in 1952.