- Open today, 10 am to 5 pm.
- Parking & Directions
- Free Admission
Gamma Lambda
Artist:
Morris Louis
(American, 1912 - 1962)
Date: 1960
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 103 1/4 x 154 1/2 in. (262.3 x 392.4 cm)
Classification: Modern art
Credit Line: Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Copyright: © Morris Louis / Artists Rights Society, New York
Object number: 77.1240
Terms
- Stripes
- Blue
- White
- Green
- Purple
- Black
- Abstract
- Washington Color Painters
- New York
In Collection(s)
On view
DescriptionThis is an acrylic painting on canvas. Channels of color flow downward from the left and right edges of the canvas, leaving the center of the painting open and empty. The top stripe is black, the second dark green the third cobalt blue and the bottom lavender, and the colors do not meet in the center; on the left, the left and green stripe converge toward the bottom.
Exhibition History"Morris Louis: Unfurled Paintings," Waddington Galleries II, London, May 13 - June 6, 1970. (Exh. cat. not paged)
"Remix Redux: A Fresh Mix For Our Modern And Contemporary Galleries," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, August 15 - December 30, 2012.
"Remix Redux: A Fresh Mix For Our Modern And Contemporary Galleries," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, August 15 - December 30, 2012.
Label textMorris Louis
American, 1912–1962
Gamma Lambda, 1960
Acrylic on canvas
Rivulets of black, green, blue, and mauve paint skirt this vast stretch of white canvas. Morris Louis created the painting by leaning a large, unprimed canvas against a wall and pouring diluted paint onto the surface. Rather than using a brush to manipulate the paint, he tilted and pleated the canvas to direct the flow, allowing the paint to seep into the raw canvas. The result is a lyrical composition that focuses on the purity of the artist’s materials and expresses a visual approach to motion.
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 77.1240
American, 1912–1962
Gamma Lambda, 1960
Acrylic on canvas
Rivulets of black, green, blue, and mauve paint skirt this vast stretch of white canvas. Morris Louis created the painting by leaning a large, unprimed canvas against a wall and pouring diluted paint onto the surface. Rather than using a brush to manipulate the paint, he tilted and pleated the canvas to direct the flow, allowing the paint to seep into the raw canvas. The result is a lyrical composition that focuses on the purity of the artist’s materials and expresses a visual approach to motion.
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 77.1240
Published References
Katherine Klapper, _Morris Louis: Major Themes & Variations_, 1-5. * Not dated, unpublished.
Waddington Galleries II, _Morris Louis: Unfurled paintings_, exh. cat., The Waddington Galleries II, London, England, 1970, not paged.
Thomas W. Styron, "Major Contemporary Works Acquired," _Chrysler Museum Bulletin_ 6, no. 13 (January 1978): cover.
Mahonri Sharp Young, "Primitive to Pop," _Apollo_ 107 (April 1978): 51.
_The Chrysler Museum: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Norfolk, Virginia_, (Norfolk: Chrysler Museum, 1982), 108. ISBN: 0-940744-37-6
Diane Upright, _Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings_ (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 165, 220, 261, no. 346. ISBN: 0810912805
Jefferson C. Harrison, _The Chrysler Museum Handbook of the European and American Collections: Selected Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings_ (Norfolk: The Chrysler Museum, 1991), 192-193, plate 146. ISBN: 0-940744-59-7, 0-940744-62-7
Brady Dyer, "Permanent Collection Highlights: Young Expands on Louis," _The Chrysler_ (Nov./Dec. 1999): 4.
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 224-225, no. 138. ISBN: 0-940744-71-6
Jeff Harrison, _Collecting with Vision: Treasures From the Chrysler Museum of Art_ (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2007), 78, fig. 90. ISBN: 978-0-940744-72-1
Provenance
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1960; Waddington Galleries, London; Alistair McAlpine, London; Waddington Galleries II, London, 1970; Galerie Marie-Louise Jeanneret, Geneva, Switzerland; Waddington Galleries, London; Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.; Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.to the Chrysler Museum, 1977.
Catalogue EntryMorris Louis
Baltimore, Md. 1912-1962 Washington, D.C.
Gamma Lambda, 1960
Acrylic on canvas, 103 1/4 × 154 1/2 in. (262.3 × 392.4 cm)
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 77.1240
Reproduction © 1960 Morris Louis
Reference: Diane Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, New York, 1985, pp. 220, 261.
During the late 1950s Morris Louis emerged, along with Kenneth Noland, as a leader of the Washington Color Painters. Working with specially thinned acrylic paints on unprimed canvas of raw white duck, Louis created three landmark series of "color stain" paintings: the Veils, Unfurleds, and Stripes in which ribbons, channels, and broad sheets of pure color flow across, and merge with, the unsized canvas.
Born in Baltimore, the son of a Russian-émigré father, Louis studied in 1927-32 at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts. During the late 1930s and 1940s he worked in New York and Baltimore, settling in Washington, D.C., in 1952. Louis experimented with a wide variety of representational and abstract styles until 1953. That spring he and Noland visited the New York studio of Helen Frankenthaler, where they discovered in her painting Mountains and Sea a revolutionary method of applying pigment to canvas. Though Frankenthaler had employed the novel drip technique of Jackson Pollock (see object 83.592)-placing her canvas on the floor and pouring paint onto it-she used paint so fluid that it washed across the unsized fabric support and soaked into it. Frankenthaler's method of stain painting transformed Louis's art. "It was as if Morris had been waiting all his life for [this] information," Noland recalled. "Once given the information, he had the ability to make pictures with it." Shortly afterwards, Louis began his mature color stain works. At the time of his death from lung cancer in 1962, his importance as an American color field painter had just begun to be widely recognized.
Gamma Lambda belongs to Louis's Unfurled series, a group of some 120 monumental paintings produced between mid-1960 and early 1961 that he considered his most significant artistic achievement. To create the watercolor-like channels of his Unfurleds, Louis typically leaned his unstretched canvas against an angled scaffolding, then poured the paint diagonally downward from the edges of the canvas, directing the flow by masking, folding, and pleating the fabric. He would leave the large central portion of the canvas open and empty, thus challenging one of the fundamental conventions of Western painting, "centrality of focus" (Kenworth Moffett).
JCH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 224-225, no. 138.
Bleeding into the weave of the fabric (and sometimes leaving behind ghostly auras of excess thinner), Louis's peripherally placed rivulets of color lose all sense of weight and texture as they merge with the yawning expanse of cotton duck that they bracket. "The effect conveys a sense not only of color as somehow disembodied, and therefore more purely optical, but also of color that . . . opens and expands the picture plane," observed critic Clement Greenberg, who did much to promote Louis's work and secure his posthumous reputation.
In Gamma Lambda, rivulets of black, green, blue, and purple skirt a vast stretch of dazzling white canvas, which assumes a powerful pictorial presence within the context of the composition's lyric sweep.
JCH
Baltimore, Md. 1912-1962 Washington, D.C.
Gamma Lambda, 1960
Acrylic on canvas, 103 1/4 × 154 1/2 in. (262.3 × 392.4 cm)
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 77.1240
Reproduction © 1960 Morris Louis
Reference: Diane Upright, Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, New York, 1985, pp. 220, 261.
During the late 1950s Morris Louis emerged, along with Kenneth Noland, as a leader of the Washington Color Painters. Working with specially thinned acrylic paints on unprimed canvas of raw white duck, Louis created three landmark series of "color stain" paintings: the Veils, Unfurleds, and Stripes in which ribbons, channels, and broad sheets of pure color flow across, and merge with, the unsized canvas.
Born in Baltimore, the son of a Russian-émigré father, Louis studied in 1927-32 at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts. During the late 1930s and 1940s he worked in New York and Baltimore, settling in Washington, D.C., in 1952. Louis experimented with a wide variety of representational and abstract styles until 1953. That spring he and Noland visited the New York studio of Helen Frankenthaler, where they discovered in her painting Mountains and Sea a revolutionary method of applying pigment to canvas. Though Frankenthaler had employed the novel drip technique of Jackson Pollock (see object 83.592)-placing her canvas on the floor and pouring paint onto it-she used paint so fluid that it washed across the unsized fabric support and soaked into it. Frankenthaler's method of stain painting transformed Louis's art. "It was as if Morris had been waiting all his life for [this] information," Noland recalled. "Once given the information, he had the ability to make pictures with it." Shortly afterwards, Louis began his mature color stain works. At the time of his death from lung cancer in 1962, his importance as an American color field painter had just begun to be widely recognized.
Gamma Lambda belongs to Louis's Unfurled series, a group of some 120 monumental paintings produced between mid-1960 and early 1961 that he considered his most significant artistic achievement. To create the watercolor-like channels of his Unfurleds, Louis typically leaned his unstretched canvas against an angled scaffolding, then poured the paint diagonally downward from the edges of the canvas, directing the flow by masking, folding, and pleating the fabric. He would leave the large central portion of the canvas open and empty, thus challenging one of the fundamental conventions of Western painting, "centrality of focus" (Kenworth Moffett).
JCH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 224-225, no. 138.
Bleeding into the weave of the fabric (and sometimes leaving behind ghostly auras of excess thinner), Louis's peripherally placed rivulets of color lose all sense of weight and texture as they merge with the yawning expanse of cotton duck that they bracket. "The effect conveys a sense not only of color as somehow disembodied, and therefore more purely optical, but also of color that . . . opens and expands the picture plane," observed critic Clement Greenberg, who did much to promote Louis's work and secure his posthumous reputation.
In Gamma Lambda, rivulets of black, green, blue, and purple skirt a vast stretch of dazzling white canvas, which assumes a powerful pictorial presence within the context of the composition's lyric sweep.
JCH