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.
Around the time of his move to Amsterdam, the Dutch painter Emanuel de Witte began to produce architectural paintings, particularly of church interiors and other grand buildings. He was interested in…
For German Jews, it was traditional in the wedding ceremony for the groom to perform the ritual of breaking a glass in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple by hurling it or banging it against…