Seattle

One of the more pleasant paradoxes of McLuhanization is that a “bush-league” town like Seattle can nurture a sensibility enlightened enough to organize, catalog and mount a major exhibition of the paintings of MorrisLouis while at the same time—by virtue of the provincialism which persists here in spite of the new global togetherness—can afford an opportunity to view Louis in fresh context.

The show was organized by theContemporary Art Council, a group formed by 25 collectors in 1964 when it became finally apparent that the Seattle Art Museum was not going to alter its policy of honoring only the artists of antiquity in general and of the ancient Orient in particular. Functioning as a tolerated stepchild of the museum, the council has brought to Seattle the Museum of Modern Art’s huge Responsive Eye anthology and a selection of FrankStella’s recent work. Last summer, it commissioned John Coplans to assemble Ten From Los Angeles, a survey of the best art being produced in Southern California. The Louis enterprise is the first that the council members themselves have organized.

Sensibly, the council resisted the impulse to attempt a Louis retrospective. It chose, instead, to restrict itself to two periods—the so-called “veils” and “unfurleds”—of the artist’s career,a decision that was not only realistic but one which permitted a more studied appreciation of the prowess of Louis’s talent than would have a less concentrated sampling of all four of his major periods. For one thing, there is greater stylistic variety within the veil series and within the unfurled series than may be found within the paintings known as “florals” or those known as “stripes.” Moreover, the pairing of veils and unfurleds illustrated dramatically the dazzling creative leaps of which Louis was capable—the veils and unfurleds are virtually pictorial opposites. In the veils, airy Niagaras of integrated color configurations flood their large supports from framing-edge to framing-edge; in the unfurleds, individual irregular ribbons of opaque color are stacked at the sides of equally large canvases, leaving in the interiors, vast expanses of surface of approximately the same size and shape as the veil image—but blank. Finally, since the specificity of its ambition allowed it to stress quality rather than quantity—of the 22 enormous pictures in the exhibition, at least 15 represent Louis at the summit of his achievement—the council was able to borrow from the Louis estate several important works which never had been displayed before.

Among the previously unexhibited pictures was Tau, a significant variant on the unfurled theme. Tau can be read as a greatly enlarged detail from one of the banked ribbon configurations of a more typical unfurled. Magnified, the ribbons (or rivulets)—flowing diagonally from framing-edge to framing-edge (and, by implication, indefinitely beyond)—take on an ominousness of shape that is only partly relieved by the resounding brilliance of their colors. In these proportions, the ribbons of consistent color become even more difficult to read as drawing than when of “normal” size; indeed, any relationship with a human creator is nearly impossible for the eye to establish. Tau, to my knowledge, is the only picture in which Louis’s romanticism seems more sardonic than benign: the proximity of large individual shapes manufactures a visual field that is oppressive, whereas Louis’s picture planes usually are almost seductively inviting. Overhang, another variant (it is owned by Mrs. C. Bagley Wright, a member of the council and the prime intelligence behind the show), appears to be a transitional painting that successfully bridges the veil and floral periods. The color configurations are more distinct, more tangible than in the usual veil, but they are monadelphous to the extent that they resist establishing planes or Cubistic juxtapositions, a condition that, as Michael Fried has pointed out, created problems in some of the florals.

The Seattle exhibition made possible a consideration of Louis not usually afforded. The Seattle art community is neither ignorant of the perspicuous formal analyses of Louis made by Greenberg and Fried, nor are we naive enough to believe that in modernistic painting content can exist independently of form. We are, however, at sufficient distance from the citadels of formalist criticism that we may—with comfort—allot more than the usual priority to the experiential aspects of Louis’s work. That Louis was a visionary painter is beyond question. But if he ever spoke of the nature of his philosophical predilections, his friends have been notably reticent on the subject. We might, however, consider several ways in which Louis’s work regularly trans-tends its own materiality—and even its predominant opticality—to provide experiences which can probably best be described as metaphysical.

Along with certain paintings by Pollock, Rothko, Reinhardt and Robert Irwin, Louis’s veils and unfurleds project an “extraterrestrial” presence as opposed to the “sea-level“ character of most art. These descriptions are not as eccentric as they would appear. At sea level, weight and gravity are, for all practical purposes, interchangeable. Likewise, in most painting, weight (a condition of pictorial density usually prescribed by opulence of pigment, fullness of volume or darkness of value) is also inseparable from gravity (a condition of pictorial force usually prescribed by changes of rhythm, dynamics of contour or balance of plane—in short, those elements which exert tension upon the picture plane and within the eye of the beholder). In outer space, however, weight and gravity can, and normally do, occur independently of one another. From a height of 200 miles, the gravity field in which an astronaut is moving still has 90 per cent of its terrestrial value, yet his weight is exactly nothing. The undulation of rivulets in the unfurleds and the lucid interchanges of color configurations in the veils exert a relatively profound gravitational force from which the eye of the observer is never free, yet despite Louis’s scale—partly because of it—the atmospheric posture and subtle balance of tensions in these pictures is such that they seem absolutely weightless. Before the veils and unfurleds, the observer experiences the exhilaration man almost always feels when he succeeds in soaring free from the earth—an exhilaration that is partially sensational but which evokes conditions of consciousness that are essentially spiritual. It is no coincidence that the gods of so many disparate cultures have dwelt in the sky.

Space in the veils and unfurleds embodies an act of manipulation with obvious supra-optic overtones. In the unfurleds, Louis parted the veils—he removed the huge continuous image which had obscured, however transparently, the center of his canvases. The space subsequently exposed, although blank, proved surprisingly to be neither dull nor dead. It possessed not only color and shape but a spatial presence at least as strong as that of the veils. Such a phenomenon could be analogous to numerous references in mystic literature to the very real substance of that formlessness which exists when form has gone. Too, from a certain perspective the unfurleds’ banks of ribbons look to be waves or beams which have been deflected by an area of space of such substance that it is impenetrable. From another perspective the same ribbons seem to be floating like banners in a space that is entirely vaporous. In either case, a sense of the void is conveyed with a reality unequalled in all of art. And, as in most Eastern philosophies, it is a void simultaneously full and empty, nothing and everything.

—Tom Robbins