Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art, Wake Forest University

“Reframing High Modernist Painting: The Case of Morris Louis”

The paintings of Morris Louis are hallmarks of a hermetic American modernism that seem far removed from the political and social concerns of the 1960s.  In this talk, Prof. Curley will use Louis’s painting as a means to explore the ways that art and science had become uncanny doppelgangers by the early part of the decade.  When considered as expressions of a technocratic turn in American culture, Louis’s works can be situated alongside those by Andy Warhol and other artists interested in machines.