The painter Morris Louis was born in Baltimore, where he attended the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1933. After four years living and working in New York, Louis returned to Baltimore to work as a private art instructor before making his final move to Washington, D.C., in 1952. The 1950s were pivotal for Louis’s career; he produced his most mature and celebrated works of art during this decade. While teaching at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts, Louis met fellow abstract painter Kenneth Noland, with whom he visited the studio of Helen Frankenthaler. Louis was profoundly inspired by Frankenthaler’s work and incorporated her method of staining canvases into his own process, producing the color-field paintings for which he is known today.
An illustration by El Lissitzky from Chaim Nahman Bialik’s Shloyme ha-melekh (King Solomon), from an issue of the Hebrew journal Shtilim (Saplings) that was printed in 1917 in Moscow, two days before…
Tomb of an Israeli Soldier I was one of a series of works painted by Michail Grobman at a time when any sympathetic gesture toward Israel was, for Soviet Jews, an act of defiance. Grobman’s very style…