Dalet Rash

The encounter with Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings in 1953 caused a complete reorientation in the work of the American artist Morris Louis. Whereas he created works in a late cubist style with certain features of eclecticism before, he now discovered his own style and became one of the most significant representatives of Colourfield Painting. Louis significantly developed the technique invented by Frankenthaler in which raw underground canvas is soaked with thin colour, whereby the picture carrier is directly involved in the painting. The influential art critic and close friend of the artist, Clement Greenberg, puts it as follows: “Louis was looking for a better identification of form and background by transferring the techniques of watercolour painting to oil painting, The canvas, soaked with colour instead of being covered by it, becomes a painting itself. It becomes the colour, like a dyed fabric. The difference between a painted and an unpainted surface no longer exists. “Dalet Rash” is one of the pictures of the “Veil series”, where Louis makes thin acrylic colour vertically run down the canvas. The combination of colour factors on the margin, white zones dyed in black and the enormous size of the canvas evoke the sensation of suspension between materiality and immateriality, between the widths and the depths of the room.