Buskin 1959

Morris Louis made this painting, "Buskin", by pouring paint onto an unprimed canvas, probably in the late 1950s or early 60s. The colors are earthy, but not in a landscape kind of way: ochre, greens, browns, a kind of muted symphony. I can imagine him in his studio, wrestling with gravity, tilting the canvas this way and that, coaxing the paint to flow in these vertical rivulets. You can almost see him thinking, what if I add a little more green here, or let the ochre bleed into the brown over there? It is a study in the behavior of color and liquid on a surface. Louis was part of a generation of painters thinking about flatness. I’m thinking of Helen Frankenthaler, too, who was interested in how color could stain the canvas itself. It’s like they were trying to get rid of the illusion of depth. They’re kind of saying, look, painting is a thing, a flat thing. And in that flatness, there is so much to see.