Pierre Soulages

Galerie de France, Paris
Acquired directly from the above in 1962

Pierre Encrevé, Soulages: L'Oeuvre Complet Peintures 1959-78, Vol. II, Paris 1995, p. 96, no. 469, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspections reveals a few isolated areas of drying cracks inherent to the artists working process. The work has been re-stretched in 1971 under the artist's supervision. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"What matters to me is what happens on the canvas.  No two brushstrokes are ever the same.  Every stroke has its own specific and irreducible attributes:  shape, length, thickness, consistency, texture, colour, and transparency.  Any particular brushstroke establishes a relationship with other forms on the canvas, with the background and with the surface as a whole." (The artist cited in Bernard Ceysson: "Interview with Pierre Soulages," Soulages, New York and Switzerland, 1980, p. 77). 

The impressive size, duality of colour and gravity of form implicit to Peinture, 10 Août 1961 immediately arrests the viewer, and locates the work within one of the artists most sought after periods of creative production that spanned the late years of the 1940s and continued through to the early years of the 1960s.   Directly addressing the tensions between shape, colour and light on the painted surface, the work captures Soulages' career long commitment to the primacy of form over illusion.  Drawing the brushstrokes dramatically across the canvas, the artist dynamically fuses the luminosity of the pigment with the texture of the paint, to create a single and instantaneous impression of aesthetic structural unity that directly brings to mind the cohesive and monumental planes of the American Abstract Expressionists.  By varying the thickness of the black paint and the length and width of the strokes over the sumptuous yellow base, Soulages builds up a rhythmic composition that both contracts and expands across the surface, energizing the interplay between yellow and black as the two colours compete for surface prominence.  Working in concert, the colours imbue the canvas with a sense of movement and unpredictable transformation, the depth and strength of their layered application engaging and sustaining the viewers gaze throughout. 

Working with oil paint that, at points, is so thick it appears to be combed onto the canvas, Soulages directs the eye of the viewer up a vertiginous pillar of black on the right, reaching the top of the canvas only to collapse, arching back down the opposing side, impressing the powerful load of the artist's stroke on the insistent presence of yellow at the bottom right hand corner.  Known for his preeminent exploitation of the physical qualities of the colour black, Soulages applies the pigment onto Peinture, 10 Août 1961 in such a way that it simultaneously exudes brilliance and sobriety, transparency and opaqueness, texture and form. The density of the black against the smooth background of yellow instills the work with an immense visual depth and creates an incandescent vibrancy as light not only reflects off the black ridges that solidify across the surface of the canvas, but also seems to burst through the veils of black paint; an orchestration of light composed through the careful control of colour and form.

Constructing his paintings out of elements that are structural but outlines that are random, Soulages' work has resisted an absolute adherence to either geometric or lyrical abstraction, instead existing at the junction between the two.   After World War II there quickly arose a connection between philosophical, moral and cultural despair, verbalized by Theodor Adorno in his famous proclamation that "there can be no poetry after Auschwitz" (Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticisms, 1951), and an approach to painting that strove for a return to man's primitive origins in an effort to wipe out the atrocities of the previous generation. While Soulages rejects the existential negation that was intrinsic to both the paintings and the theoretical discourse of his European contemporaries, his work interestingly evokes the awe-inspiring canvases and emotional intensity of the most notable American Abstract Expressionists including Mark Rothko, Franz Klein, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Going beyond the dimensions of the easel, Soulages' work echoes these artists as they challenge the viewer, commanding an intensification of the human experience as they stand before the work.  However, while the work of Rothko and many other Abstract Expressionists invites the spectator to lose themselves within the canvas' sublimity, the planular layers of Soulages' compositions provide no psychological entry into his work, but rather block the viewer and fix them to the surface, imposing a visual investigation of tangible reality through texture and form.

Refusing to compartmentalize the meaning of his paintings into a specific chronological period, an approach the artist believes to be a misguided denial of a work's unique compositional character, Soulages instead situates his work outside of history, allowing each to convey an autonomous beauty regardless of time or place:  "I don't depict.  I don't narrate.  I don't represent. I paint, I present." (The artist cited in: "Interview with Michel Peppiatt" Art International, November-December 1980).