Day: April 4, 2021

Partition by Morris Louis

~ JezzieG

Partition
1962
Color Field Painting
Acrylic paint on canvas
Tate Modern, London, UK

‘Partition’ is one of Louis’ Stripe series, all of which were painted in the last months of his life. The works were part of the artists interest in the optical effects of colour relationships at the same time his simplification of non-representational form to extremes. The Stripe works illustrate Louis’ increasingly stripped-down approach to composition and form. Highly systemic and devoid of the artist’s own expressive gestures, the Stripe canvases consist of streams of paint running in tight parallel groupings of narrow bands of colour. These late works of Louis’ emphasize the most basic geometry of straight lines and point the way towards the Minimalist school of the 1960s and 1970s.

Morris Louis
Color Field Painting, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Washington Color School
Born: 28 November 1912, Maryland, USA
Nationality: American
Died: 7 September 1962, Washington DC, USA

Louis was one of the leading artists in Colour Field painting, along with his contemporaries Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler. In a short prolific career Louis continually experimented with method and medium, manipulating large canvases in creative wats to control the flow and stain of paint. His maturity of style, characterized by layered veils and rivulets of poured acrylic paint on untreated canvases, make his paintings among the most iconic works of Colour Field painting.

Repeat and Reverse by Josef Albers

~ JezzieG

Repeat and Reverse
1963
Bauhaus
Stainless steel on concrete
Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Albers created the Repeat and Reverse sculpture at the request of Paul Rudolph, the architect of the Art and Architecture Building at Yale University. Albers used a simple arrangement of steel bars to produce a three-dimensional illusion of planes that seemingly project and recede into the wall.

Josef Albers
Bauhaus, Geometric Abstraction, Op Art
Born: 19 March 1888, Bottrop, Germany
Nationality: American
Died: 25 Match 1976, Connecticut, USA

Albers was an instrumental artist bringing the tenets of European modernism of Bauhaus to America. His legacy as a teacher of artists and his extensive theoretical work proposing colour, rather than form, is the primary medium of pictorial language profoundly influenced the development of American modern art throughout the 1950s and 1960s.