Morris Louis: The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Louis's huge color-field paintings are modern icons. Long streaks of pure color jostle against each other, creating new energies. In his ""Unfurled'' series, the sheer emptiness of the center of the canvas makes the few draped color lines seem like heroic acts of triumph over nothingness. His gauze-like, lyrical ``Veils'' are bursting with potentiality, yet not of this world. In Elderfield, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Louis has found the ideal interpreter. His minute analyses of how the viewer responds to a Louis painting give full attention to their poetic and even spiritual qualities, their roots in Symbolism, their associations with light, air, fire and water. This catalogue of a traveling exhibition makes a convincing case for the view that Louis wedded Mediterranean flatness to glaring American light in works of curious power and intensity. (October 31)