Morris Louis (1912 - 1962)

MORRIS LOUIS was born in Baltimore in 1912. He studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts from 1927-32.

In 1935, Louis was elected president of the Baltimore Artists’ Association. He moved to New York in 1936 and returned to Baltimore in 1940. In 1952, he moved to Washington D.C. where he taught at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts. Louis became known as a prominent Color Field painter.

In 1953, Louis had a solo show at the Workshop Art Center Gallery – his first. During the 1950s and early ’60s, he had many solo shows and was included in numerous group shows, including American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1961 and a memorial retrospective of his work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1963.

His paintings are in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1962 and died later that year in Washington D.C. at the age of 49.

www.morrislouis.org