Morris Louis, a native of Baltimore, became part of a group of Washington, D.C. painters in the mid-1950s known for their use of bright, modern colors and washes of synthetic paint. Theirs was an innovative technique likely learned during a 1953 visit to the New York studio of Helen Frankenthaler, where Louis and his colleagues were exposed to Frankenthaler"s method of staining her canvases with thinned-down pigments, giving a sense of soaked or stained color where medium and support were often indiscernible from each other. Louis"s series of purely abstract works include the Unfurleds (1959–61), of which the present work is an example, wherein streaks of bold pigment, poured at angles to the bottom corners of the support, leave a large area of raw, unembellished canvas at center.