Morris Louis, 1960, Beth Aleph, Acrylic on canvas, Jane and Roger Wolcott Memorial, gift of Thomas T. Solley, Indiana University Art Museum.

Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland developed a poured-paint technique inspired by the experimental, collaborative gathering of jazz musicians.

Visitors to the IU Art Museum's Jazz in July series (see related story) also will have the opportunity to view Morris Louis' Beth Aleph, which will be on display in the first-floor Gallery of Art of the Western World and open before, during and after the concert on Friday evenings in July at the museum's sculpture garden on the Bloomington campus.

The large painting, comprised of flowing, vertical bands of rich colors, was painted in 1960, just two years before the artist's death at age 49. The canvas is one of a series known as Veils.

A visit to Helen Frankenthaler's New York City studio in 1952 was an eye-opener for the Washington, D.C.-based Louis, who adopted Frankenthaler's technique of staining unprimed canvas with thinned paint to achieve wash-like, almost transparent configurations of pure color. After pouring thinned acrylic pigment onto the canvas, Louis manipulated it to achieve wash-like, almost transparent configurations of pure color. After pouring thinned acrylic pigment onto the canvas, Louis manipulated it to achieve the desired flow and direction of the paint.

Together with painter Kenneth Noland, Louis developed this poured-paint technique during a series of "jam painting" sessions, inspired by the experimental, collaborative gathering of jazz musicians. As an example of color field painting, a variation on abstract expressionism, Beth Aleph is characterized by orderly abstract forms and an emphasis on color as an expressive force.

Although the Hebrew title Beth Aleph was posthumously assigned to the painting by Louis' widow, her choice of title enables a deeper meaning to Louis' painting. Aleph and Beth, the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, are, of course, the words from which the English word "alphabet" is derived.

Were letters or text important to Louis' conception of color field painting? In Beth Aleph, the curving, tapering stripes of color evoke the calligraphic strokes rendered by a giant fountain pen. Calligraphic or hieroglyphic markings were intrinsic to abstract expressionism, appearing in the works of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Franz Kline. Likewise, from the 1930s onwards, abstracted Hebrew letters and script played a role in Louis' work. He was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents and would have known that the Hebrew script, according to Jewish mystical tradition, was considered a vehicle for meditation and spiritual contemplation. Abstract painting in America during the 1940s and 1950s--an amalgamation of surrealism, Romantic ideals and the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious--also was thought of in spiritual or contemplative terms.

Related story:
Jazz it up Friday evenings in July