Dalet Tet
Artist: Morris Louis (American, 1912-1962)
Date: 1959
Dimensions:
Painting: 104 1/4 × 95 in. (264.8 × 241.3 cm)
Frame: 104 3/4 × 95 1/2 × 3 in. (266.1 × 242.6 × 7.6 cm)
Medium: acrylic resin (Magna) on canvas
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Object number: 2005.32
Label Text:Named for the fourth and ninth letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Dalet Tet, one of Morris Louis’s most striking paintings from a series known as Veils, suggests a waterfall of multiple colors of paint layered one upon another. The majority of the large unprimed canvas is darkened by the accumulation of wet pigments and a wash of diluted dark paint. However, at the extreme top, the individual colors that make up the painting can be seen.
Louis came of age in the generation of the Abstract Expressionist painters and, like the most prominent artists of that group (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning), he made large and bold gestural compositions. He chose to work with newly invented acrylic paints, sometimes acquiring them before they were even available on the market. He diluted these paints to make them thinner and poured them, with the aid of gravity, down his canvases. Working with raw canvas allowed the liquid colors to penetrate and stain the fabric, so that paint and canvas became one—and his compositions became “paintings about painting,” one of the hallmarks of Modernism
Louis came of age in the generation of the Abstract Expressionist painters and, like the most prominent artists of that group (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning), he made large and bold gestural compositions. He chose to work with newly invented acrylic paints, sometimes acquiring them before they were even available on the market. He diluted these paints to make them thinner and poured them, with the aid of gravity, down his canvases. Working with raw canvas allowed the liquid colors to penetrate and stain the fabric, so that paint and canvas became one—and his compositions became “paintings about painting,” one of the hallmarks of Modernism
Not on view
In Collection(s)