North Carolina Museum of Art

Morris Louis's paintings appear serene and almost ethereal. Working within a cramped studio, the artist pleated and tacked large spans of cotton canvas to a wooden stretcher, then poured diluted paint down the pleats, tilting the stretcher to further guide the course of the liquid. Paint soaked the fabric, like watercolor into paper. Critics at the time praised the flat, uninflected character of surfaces. Writing in 1960, Clement Greenberg insisted that Louis's "suppression of the difference between painted and unpainted surfaces causes pictorial space to leak through—or rather, to seem about to leak through—the framing edges of the picture into the space beyond them."* Pi is one of the earliest of the Unfurleds, a series of 150 heroic-size paintings, each characterized by symmetrical banks of streaming color separated by an empty expanse of white. Despite the simplicity and flatness of the design, the bleached white of the canvas and the rivulets of color interact to create the illusion of vibrant space. In Pi the progression of color, warm-to-cool, furthers the sense of recession, as through a valley, toward a luminous void. Occupying two-thirds of the canvas, that void becomes the dominant element, uniting as well as dividing the sides. In such paintings, Louis aspired to a sublime purity of expression, cleared of the rhetorical and nonessential—a singularly visual experience.

^*Art International (May 1960)