The explosion of improvised strokes in Silver III, painted the year before Louis began his groundbreaking Veil series, reveals the artist’s roots in Abstract Expressionism. In April of 1953, Louis traveled to New York, where he visited the studio of Helen Frankenthaler and viewed paintings at first-hand by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. These encounters made a strong impression on him. Upon his return to Washington, D.C., Louis began to work on a larger scale, experimenting with new methods of applying paint to canvas in works such as Silver III. Louis’s drip technique and use of aluminum paint suggest the influence of Pollock, while passages of exuberant brushwork recall a style more characteristic of Kline and Willem de Kooning. However, compared to de Kooning and Pollock’s dense, encrusted surfaces, Louis’s canvas exhibits a looser handling and thinner application of paint, more akin to that of Frankenthaler. Silver III records Louis’s dialogue with the artists he admired as he began to develop his own sensibility. Examples of the works of de Kooning, Frankenthaler, and Pollock are presented in the adjacent gallery.