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Blue Veil.

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Larger Image	Larger image may be viewed by UofL faculty, staff, and students only (log-in required using ULink username/password) at: http://echo.louisville.edu/login?url=http://vrc-web.louisville.edu/Jpegs/820/827-34.jpg
Title	Blue Veil.
Creator	Louis, Morris (American painter, 1912-1962)
Date	1958-1959
Cultural Context	American North American
Style/Period	Abstract (fine arts style) Color-field Post-painterly Abstraction Modern (styles and periods) Modernist
Theme	Paintings (visual works) Acrylic paintings (visual works) Abstraction
Subject	Paintings Acrylic paintings Abstract paintings Abstract works
Description	"In Louis's enormous 'veils' of the 1950s the physical operations of pouring paint or tilting a canvas so that the paint floods down it are powerfully implied." (Caption, p.28); "[Clement] Greenberg's conception of 'Modernism' as synonymous with formal completion or inviolability (which could be seen as keyed to America's postwar imagining of its world position) was to fuel a mutually self-aggrandizing tradition of painting and art criticism in the 1950s and 1960s. Three of the principal painters concerned, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, were introduced by Greenberg in April 1953 when the two Washington-based male artists were taken by the critic to Frankenthaler's studio in New York. Her near-legendary painting Mountains and Sea (1952: National Gallery of Art, Washington) particularly impressed Louis in terms of its abandonment of the traditional build-up of brushmarks in favor of a process of 'staining' such that acrylic pigments were allowed to soak into large areas of unprimed canvas (a technique with which [Jackson] Pollock had briefly experimented in 1951-2). Given that color here was literally at one with the weave of the canvas, rather than lying 'on top' of it, the technique tied in with the Modernist imperative towards flatness. Indeed, it achieved what Greenberg and his disciple Michael Fried were to describe as a supreme 'opticality' in so far as the color - literally poured or spilled in plumes and rivulets onto the canvas in the case of Louis's aptly titled Veils of the mid-1950s - not only formed an evenly textured 'field' but also gave an effect of luminosity. […] In terms of the rigorous hair's-breadth distinctions of Greenberg's criticism, this represented a step beyond the 'all-over' abstractions of Pollock and [Barnett] Newman. However, this dour masculinist discourse of aesthetic one-upmanship obscures the fact that Louis's 'veils' may have 'feminine' connotations (a point worth contrasting with Pollock's very different understanding of 'veiling' […]). Feminist writers have persuasively argued that Frankenthaler's stained canvases have, in the past, suffered from being designated 'feminine' (and hence closer to the natural, the merely decorative, or the intuitive as opposed to the cultural) but interpreting Louis's work in this way suggests that social stereotypes regarding gender might equally be overturned within works by male artists." (Excerpt, pp.29-30)
Material	Acrylic resin painted on canvas Acrylic resin on canvas Canvas Acrylic paint Paint
Measurements	233.05 x 396.24 cm
Technique	Soak-stain technique Painting (image-making) Acrylic painting (technique)
Work Type	Paintings Acrylic paintings Abstract paintings Abstract works
Repository	Harvard University Art Museums, Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, Massachusetts) Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
Source	Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (pp.26-27, fig.13)
Rights	Photograph reproduced in Hopkins courtesy: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museum, Gift of Lois Orswell and purchase from the Gifts for Special Uses Fund. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Harvard University.
Digital Publisher	University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center
Format	image/jpeg
Digital File Name	VRC 827-34.jpg
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