With an exceptional output of mature work that spanned little more than ten years, Morris Louis played an essential role in shaping postwar American art. Louis worked in an innovative manner by "staining" canvases with thinned acrylic pigments, using intense, rich washes of color to create unified compositions. Although he worked in isolation from other artists, Louis's work is often grouped together with that of the Color Field painters of the early 1960s, whose work developed alongside Abstract Expressionism. Louis is best known for work produced during the last nine years of his life, when he began to think in terms of open color "freed" from shape and drawing, acquiring a reality of its own that was purely visual.