Nature's Nation
The Color Field painter Morris Louis (1912-1962) strove to find new means of applying color to his canvases. Although a painting such as Intrigue initially seems to discourage ecocritical analysis, since it eschews traditional subject matter, it is first and foremost about process and materials. Louis made his "Veil" paintings, of which intrigue is an early example, with Magna acrylic paints, produced for him by the paint manufacturer Leonard Bocour. Louis began experimenting with synthetic paints and diverse application techniques after a visit to Helen Frankenthaler's studio in 1953 left him impressed by the effects she was able to achieve using unconventional methods. To create Intrigue and his other Veil paintings, Louis thinned Magna color with turpentine and a polybutyl methacrylate called Acryloid F-10, which he purchased directly from the chemical company Rohm & Haas. According to archived receipts, he purchased large quantities of turpentine from Chevy Chase Paint and Hardware Company‚—at least forty-one gallons in 1955 alone‚—and ordered Acryloid F-10 from Rohm & Haas in five-gallon increments almost monthly. Based on his receipts for painting supplies in 1958, Louis used approximately nine tubes of paint and four and a half gallons of thinner per painting. The smell of turpentine, which can irritate skin and eyes and damage the lungs, respiratory system, and central nervous system when inhaled, reportedly pervaded the artist's entire house. Louis died in 1962 at the age of forty-nine from lung cancer, which has been attributed to his prolonged exposure to turpentine fumes.
Turpentine used by Louis had a devastating effect on environments and people in the American South as well. Prior to World War II, pine-derived resources such as tar, pitch, gum, rosin, and turpentine‚—also called "naval stores"‚—were used primarily for shipbuilding and repair. Turpentiners extracted the rosin from remote pine forests from early spring to late fall. Trees were debarked, hacked into, and sometimes coated with acid to stimulate gum flow and finally cut down by loggers after a few years of extraction. In the antebellum period, depletion of northern pine forests moved most naval stores production to the South, where it became part of the plantation economy. By the mid-nineteenth century, naval stores ranked third behind cotton and tobacco as the most important export from the American South. Most turpentine workers, before and after the Civil War, were African American. The industry was so closely associated with black labor and bodies that one turpentine operator even developed a grading system using the names of his African American workers and family members whose skin tones most closely matched the rosins' coloring.
--Laura Turner Igoe Collections Assessment Project Manager, Barnes Foundation
