The premise to Morris Louis' resplendent veil Beth Zayin was born out of his fastidious methodology that explored methods of paint application in an effort to preserve the picture-plane as a two-dimensional surface. Louis achieved this through an adaptation of a paint staining technique first revealed to him upon a visit to Helen Frankenthaler's studio in 1952 with Kenneth Noland. His resultant Veils would address formalist concerns of the canvas surface as an expansive, flat, nonfigural field. The Veils also share in the underlying principles contingent to Jackson Pollock's drip painting, as neither owed recourse to lines, edges, or contours denoting tangible things. (Michael Fried in Exh. Cat., Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Morris Louis, 1912-1962, 1967, p. 11). In 1954, Louis's Veil paintings would immediately engage him with one of the most significant artistic circles of the time under the critical direction of Clement Greenberg. Greenberg professed the primacy of maintaining the integrity of formal principles in the basic elements of painting. With his color-stain technique, Louis's focus on the inherent nature of paint, canvas and color was in sympathy to Greenberg's teachings, and the critic included the spectral Veils in Louis's first solo exhibition at French & Company in New York.

Beth Zayin is abstinent of idiomatic brush application and is void of texture and gesture. Louis achieved this through the successive application of waves of synthetic acrylic resin paint, magna, which ebbed and flowed across the unprimed duck canvas. The final effects were suggestive of translucent color veils. The achievement of the technique would be hailed by art circles in the following years, "Sometimes a direct manipulation of a given material without the use of any tool is made. In these cases considerations of gravity become as important as those of space;" (Robert Morris, "Anti-Form," Artforum 6, no. 8, April 1968, p. 35).

The monumental scale of the Veils, coupled with the vibrant saturation of pigment on the the surface of Beth Zayin, endows the present painting with a prowess that emulates the name it bears. Similar to the majority of the Veils, Beth Zayin was titled posthumously by the artist's estate. Zayin, the seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet, literally means "weapon" or "sword", but derives from a root that means sustenance or nourishment. This verbal paradox appears to animate the painting's surface, as the bands of brilliant, curving color-shapes simultaneously submerge and emerge from the more somber, darker veils. While in some of the more melancholic Veils, the darker tones predominate, the spectrum of vivid color in Beth Zayin is ascendant, emerging from the edges of the darker veils and overpowering the composition with its primal force. Beth Zayin's expansive splendor and specific methodology exemplifies the triumph that is color-field painting.