In a mature career of eight feverishly productive years, Morris Louis made an astonishing number of the most ravishing, mysterious, unyieldingly abstract paintings of the twentieth century. Between 1954 and his death, aged fifty, in 1962, Louis produced about six hundred large paintings composing the series known as Veils, Unfurleds, and Stripes, among others. These works are so authoritatively present that they compel our attention, and so disembodied that they appear to be pure essence. The confrontational Veils with their implacable “curtains” of layered hues, the tense Unfurleds with their wide-spaced cascades of clear chroma and empty centers, and the economical Stripes with their disciplined ranks of exuberant color, all seem based on a desire to reduce painting to its essentials without sacrificing its ability to stir us.

Louis’s pictures test both the autonomy and the expressive potential of color, expanse, interval, and shape; they even seem to test whether the fact that paint is liquid can be eloquent. Louis’s abstractions completely disassociate the raw materials of painting from reference, just as they disassociate gesture from handwriting, yet there is nothing impersonal about the result. Even in pictures that at first reading appear to be nothing more than floods of thinned-out pigment, responding to the dictates of gravity, we’re aware of the intuitive intelligence that made that wash of color assume the configuration before us. Louis’s pictures stop us in our tracks by their size and grandeur. They seduce us by the subtleties of their