We’ve all been there before. It’s the middle of the day, you’re at the office, and you start getting a craving for some Color Field painting, specifically the works of Morris Louis (1912–1962), but you can’t make it to your local art museum. It’s painful. Happily, there is now at least a partial solution: MorrisLouis.org, which officially launched this week and features the artist’s complete catalogue raisonné, with information about every single one of his more than 1,000 paintings and drawings. All but a very few are illustrated.
The site is the work of Diane Upright Fine Arts, LLC, The Estate of Morris Louis, and The Morris Louis Art Trust, and the result of some three years of labor. Planning began in 2011 when the Estate was in the process of dissolving, following the death of Louis’s widow, Marcella Louis Brenner.
“We wanted to create something that would preserve Louis’s legacy, and we knew that online is the way of the future,” said Jennifer S. Musawwir, the initiative’s project director, who’s employed by Upright. The physical catalogues raisonné of paintings and drawings, which were compiled by Upright, are currently out of print, and so, Musawwir explained that they said to themselves, “Let’s take them and put it on this website and make it a resource for scholars, collectors, for everyone.”
The website arrives as New York’s Mnuchin Gallery opens a show of the artist’s “Veil” paintings this week. That show runs through October 18, but images of all but but one are currently available in right through this link. The Maryland Institute College of Art, which Morris attended, and which holds a collection of work and papers by the artist, will administer the site.