‘It’s like an excavation’: the powerful black paintings of Pierre Soulages
Known for years as France’s greatest living artist, Pierre Soulages created pulsating black paintings that have been a mainstay of museums around the world. He is often grouped with abstract expressionism for his dedication to exploring the medium of paint itself and for the extraordinary textures on his canvases. The first anniversary of Soulages’s death, which occurred last October when the artist was 102 years old, is commemorated in a new retrospective at the gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan titled Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight.
Soulages began to exhibit in the 1940s, soon attracting attention from tastemaking venues like the Venice Biennale and the influential Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City. He worked methodically throughout the 1960s and 1970s, producing paintings centered around bold, thick smears of black. It was in 1979 that Soulages made the discovery that was to guide his artistic output for the rest of his life, inaugurating his “outrenoir”, or “beyond black”, work. Describing his discovery, Soulages has stated that, one day in January 1979 he stood before an allblack canvas and had a revelation. “In this extreme I saw, in a sense, the negation of black. The different textures reflected more or less weakly the light and from the darkness there emanated a clarity, a pictorial light whose particular emotional power awoke my desire to paint.”
In an interview about the new exhibit, Dominique Lévy, an art dealer and co-founder of Lévy Gorvy Dayan who worked with Soulages for many years, stated that one goal of this retrospective was to “to create the the impetus of a desire for a real retrospective at a major museum in the United States”. Lévy added that although Soulages
has been celebrated by museums across Europe, including being only one of three living artists to have a major retrospective at the Louvre (Picasso and Chagall were the others), she does not believe he has received the recognition he deserves from art museums in the US.
From Midnight to Twilight tackles an impressive swath of Soulages’s production, starting with works from the 1950s and 1960s. Educational resources at the exhibit give a sense of the milieu that the artist inhabited as he became known in the US: during his first visit, in 1957, Soulages became friends with fellow abstract expressionist Mark Rothko after meeting him at a party (the two men first argued, but later found common ground); during that same trip he had a studio visit with Willem de Kooning. Visitors can also read letters to Soulages from the likes of New York art world mainstays Robert Motherwell and his partner, Helen Frankenthaller, as well as the gamechanging gallery owner Leo Castelli.
The centerpiece of the show is the artist’s beyond black period, which dominated the painter’s work for 40 years after making a career-changing discovery: “In 1979, suddenly he realized that he can use the black as a reflection of the light,” said Lévy, “and he paints in black all the way through his death.” Soulages created these distinctive works by applying thick layers of paint that he would then dig and scrape through, leaving behind a work that seems as much sculpture as painting. The beyond black works are breathtaking for their texture, many formed by multiple horizontal lines and boxes scored into the paint in various shades of black and gray. They are beautiful for their minimalism and for the forms that Soulages can wrest from the paint, a testament to the hours he would spend laboring over each and every incision. As he once stated: “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.”
Although Soulages is often grouped with abstract expressionists and gained much from being shown alongside them, he always eschewed being grouped into any kind of movement, and Lévy described the beyond black works as coming out of a desire to go beyond the ideas of abstract expressionism. “In ’79, the gesture to break from figuration feels dated to [Soulages]”, she said. Lévy described the beyond black works as something entirely different from what the artist’s contemporaries were creating. “It’s never just a black surface, it’s like an excavation. They take whatever atmosphere, whatever light, and they become beyond black, because they reflect the light. I’ve never experienced anything like them, except maybe with Mark Rothko, the light pulsates. Every single color in the planet is in this black. You feel like you’re in front of a presence, they’re quite erratic.”
Soulages would maintain that the paintings from the beyond black period were not made with black but rather come from “a different country from black”, This is where the term “outrenoir” comes from, as Soulages explained that a French speaker might say “outre-Rhin”, or “beyond the Rhine”, to refer to Germany. He wanted his works not to be perspectives on people and places but rather ways to look inward. “For him a painting is not a window, it’s a wall,” said Lévy. “These paintings are these monumental walls.”
Soulages’s unique relationship with black goes back to his teenage years, when he was inspired by prehistoric cave art that he saw as part of an archaeological expedition; the artist would later maintain that this art was more meaningful than later artistic styles to come throughout the centuries of human development. He told Interview magazine in 2014: “It’s fascinating to think that as soon as man came into existence, he started painting. As I said, I’ve always loved black, and I realized that, from the beginning, man went into completely dark caves to paint.”
From Midnight to Twilight is a loving homage to an artist with whom Lévy had a deep personal connection, going to great lengths to put together a fitting tribute to Soulages on the anniversary of his death. Most of the pieces have been lent by significant art institutions – including the Met, the Guggenheim, the Art Institute of Chicago – and the curation has been careful to offer works that are each significant in their own right in order to give audiences a fuller picture of Soulages the artist. Educational and contextual pieces further help audiences understand an artist who has not yet been fully introduced to the US context. “It was a bit of an impossible mission to put together a show like this in such a short time,” said Lévy.
From Midnight to Twilight makes a considerable case for why Soulages deserves to be honored by major US art institutions, and it also shows an artist whose work has endured, offering much to those creating art today. As Lévy put it: “He’s a great master for courage. He’s a great master for generosity. And he’s a great master for radical thinking. I think these three transcend time.”
Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight is on display at Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York until 4 November
a testy crew-cut autocrat who never demanded our sympathy even if he ultimately gained it. It was Brook’s idea to present the play with a moral neutrality so that Goneril and Regan reasonably objected to the presence of Lear’s obstreperous knights. But it was Scofield, with that voice that could cut through metal, who showed us that Lear was driven by a desire to punish his daughters: “I shall go mad!”, as Tynan noted, became a threat rather than a pathetic prediction.
If Scofield drained the part of sentimentality, John Wood’s performance, in Nicholas Hytner’s 1990 RSC production, was equally groundbreaking. What we learned was that there was no simple linear progression in Lear in which folly led to madness and thence to moral regeneration: the essence of Wood’s Lear was that he lived in a permanent state of spiritual schizophrenia. “Better thou hadst not been born,” he cried to Cordelia but then choked, unable to finish the sentence. Having intemperately cursed Goneril with sterility, he suddenly rushed to give her a fierce paternal embrace. This was a Lear of boundless curiosity: in the hovel scene he pursued Poor Tom with the fascination of a questing scientist. But, above all, Wood reminded us that both the role of King Lear, and the play itself, is one of endless, and even senseless, contradiction.
But all the best Lears quicken one’s apprehension. When Ian McKellen played the part in Trevor Nunn’s 2007 production he showed us, just as he had in his first great success in Richard II, that Lear moves from a figure encased in public ceremony to one who reaches the square root of humanity. Simon Russell Beale, in Sam Mendes’s 2014 National Theatre production, not only highlighted the role’s contradictions but also its wild comedy: in the hovel scene, padding around in his underpants, he affected to put Goneril and Regan on trial while staring at an upended tea-urn and a lavatory bowl. A year later Barrie Rutter, in a memorable Jonathan Miller production for Northern Broadsides, showed that Lear is a play rooted in a domestic conflict that only gradually expands into a metaphor for universal crisis: Rutter’s Lear was above all else an errant father for whom even the division of the kingdom was an intimate family affair.
We have also learned in recent years that Lear is a role that transcends gender. Kathryn Hunter has played the part twice in productions for Helena Kaut-Howson. I saw the first one at Leicester Haymarket in 1997 where the play became a dying woman’s fantasy expressing all her thoughts about filial ingratitude and cosmic cruelty: with her stick-wielding testiness and dry sandpaper voice, Hunter gave us the essence of Lear.
Glenda Jackson was no less astonishing in Deborah Warner’s 2016 Old Vic production. As an ex politician, Jackson understandably emphasised Lear’s rage at earthly injustice but also brought out brilliantly the character’s volatility, waywardness and erosion of the division between sanity and madness. Since she was 80 when she played the part, her stamina was remarkable. But Jackson’s performance confirmed something I have discovered from a lifetime of Lears: that when actors banish all thoughts of the mythic and the monumental and use their own lifeexperience to present us with a recognisable human being then the part of Lear becomes essentially, if not easily, playable.