A Look At a Beautiful Impasse

By ROBERT HUGHES

It is advisable when visiting the Morris Louis retrospective now on view at New York City's Museum of Modern Art to recall the claims made for this painter ten or 15 years ago. In such work, the art historian Michael Fried once wrote, "what is nakedly and explicitly at stake . . . is nothing less than the continued existence of painting as a high art." It contained "unimagined possibilities for the future of painting." One chews on this, moving from one sweetly august canvas to the next, enjoying the floods and diaphanous veils of color, the sheaves of burning stripes, the technical control, and marvels once more at the unpredictability of shifts in the pecking order of the American art world. Whatever painting may be argued to depend on today, it is not the lyric disembodied stain. Its possibilities for the future turned out to be not just unimagined but non-existent. History, fickle jade, balked at this fence and took a turn. One cannot imagine future painters mining Louis' work for motifs and ideas, the way Jackson Pollock's was mined by Louis and other artists of his generation. Here is the beautiful impasse, the last exhalation of symbolist nuance in America, soon to be a period style.

Louis was only 49 when he died of lung cancer in 1962, and his early death made him the Thomas Chatterton of formalism, the "marvelous boy," dying just as his genius was ready to blossom. He owes his reputation to the critic Clement Greenberg, who was also his coach. It is not really true, as has often been said, that Greenberg told Louis what to paint, though he probably had more influence over this lonely, gifted and insecure man than any American critic has had over any other artist. Nevertheless, Louis' instinct for light as the primal theme of painting, and his desire to find a refined hedonistic syntax for it, winds back beyond Greenberg to the fact that he spent his time as a student in Washington looking at the Bonnards in the Phillips Collection rather than the Picassos at the Museum of Modern Art.

Bonnard's light and Matisse's luxe, run through Greenberg's reduction mill and then filtered by Louis' own obsession with the ethereal, came out in a curiously attenuated form. But it supported -- and after Louis' death was in turn supported by -- the argument that after Pollock painting had only one way to go. No more figures, organic symbolism or utopian geometry; no more gestural surfaces, tonal structure or cubist layering of space. In future, art would hang onto the spread-out, expansive quality of Pollock's work while refreshing it with a new intensity of color, inspired by Matisse. At the end of the purge you would have a clipped but radiant discourse of pure hue, fixed by an exaggerated pictorial flatness, done in thinned translucent washes that became the surface. Louis' direct inspiration for this was an early canvas by Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, whose liquid blotches and airy sense of light struck him, in one of the few quotable phrases he left behind, as a "bridge between Pollock and what was possible."

Thus emerged the chief form of American museum art in the early '60s: The Watercolor That Ate the Art World. Of course, one could hardly come right out with it and say the works of Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis (quite apart from the thousands of yards of lyric acrylic on unprimed duck done by their many forgotten imitators) were basically huge watercolors. But there was little in the soak-stain methods of color-field painting that did not seek and repeat watercolor effects. The big difference lay in the size, the curtness and (sometimes) the grandeur of the image, and in the scrutiny it received from Greenberg's disciples, rocking and muttering over the last grain of pigment in the weave of these canvases, like students of the Talmud disputing a text, before issuing their communiques about the Inevitable Course of Art History to the readers of Artforum.

When Louis' work is unwrapped from its exegetical package, quite a lot is still left. These paintings are among the most purely optical ever made in America. Some look like mere swatches, but many do retain the mystery of a tour de force: you can see how they are painted but not imagine doing it yourself, even when Louis' own technique is made clear. He eschewed the usual signs of pictorial handwriting, the hooking and squiggling of the brush.

Instead, Louis sought a language of impersonal nuances. He found it in a complicated process of pleating the canvas and flooding it with runnels of diluted color, wash after wash, never a brush mark in sight. He "drew" his shapes by manipulating the effects of gravity on liquid. This certainly eliminated the traces of the expressive hand and gave his surfaces a sweet, frictionless clarity. It was also chancy in the extreme, since it courted the possibility of turning the image into a decorative Rorschach blot. But Louis destroyed much of his own work, editing heavily, and the sense of risk in the surviving paintings gave them an intriguing tension, as though their radiance had been snatched from the very jaws of entropy. His best works, like Beth Gimel, 1958, or Beth Chaf, 1959, touch upon the exalted otherness of nature (one might be looking at an aurora borealis or a butte), and their concentration on broad effect of light and color, coupled with the impersonality of their technique, seems to connect back through Georgia O'Keeffe's watercolors to 19th century American luminism. (To visit Washington in the spring and see its broad avenues framed in V perspectives of flowering plums and cherries is perhaps to sense a connection with Louis' late "Unfurleds" of 1960-61.) Yet despite his expertise, precision of feeling and taste, Morris Louis does not come out of this show looking like a great painter. What is left? A perfume; a visual buzz unlike any other -- and the persistent impression of small pictorial ideas writ large. But for what it is, the work can still offer intense pleasure to the eye while inadvertently reminding you that beauty, in art, is not enough.