Morris Louis was born in 1912 and died in 1962. He was past forty before he broke through to his mature art. But the several hundred paintings that he made between 1954 and his death at the age of forty-nine are today widely recognized as the work of a major artist. In this first full-length monograph on Louis, the critic and art historian Michael Fried maintains that Louis is one of the supreme masters of color in modernist painting. At the same time, he argues, Louis' accomplishment ought largely to be seen in terms of a complex, and constantly changing, involvement with figuration and drawing. Indeed, he tries to show how that involvement may have been crucial to Louis' superb achievements as a colorist during the last eight years of his life. Fried, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University, also discusses the importance of works by Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler to Louis' initial breakthrough; his friendships with Clement Greenberg and Kenneth Noland; his methods of working, which involved staining acrylic paint into lengths of canvas; and his role in the recent development of modernist painting. The author analyzes each of Louis' principal series of paintings - the veils, florals, unfurleds, and stripes - in an effort both to characterize the unique properties of each and to define the common preoccupations of all. The result is a full, persuasive account of Louis' art. The numerous illustrations in this volume include a selection of Louis' pre-1954 works in several mediums. But the vast majority reproduce the remarkable paintings of the years 1954-62, on which Louis' reputation rests. The generous choice of colorplates bears witness to his mastery as a colorist, while the black-and-whites suggest the extraordinary range of his art. The text and illustrations together make an important contribution to the literature of modern painting. - Dust jacket.