Abstracts and the army
Europe enlivens New York at TEFAF and jubilee fever takes over LAPADA
THE abstract painter Pierre Soulages is aged over 102 and still working, at least until very recently. I have long thought that Renoir would have much more deserved his reputation as a great painter had he had the self-discipline to destroy twothirds of his output and Soulages supports this point. As he said before the retrospective marking his centenary, if he is not 100% happy with a painting he burns it. ‘If it is mediocre, it goes.’ Such rigour befits the character of the art of a man who works almost entirely in black (Fig 2).
However, unlike a canvas by Ad Reinhardt (1913–67)—an interesting graphic artist, writer and polemicist, but very boring minimalist painter of black squares —a Soulages is alive and full of nuance. He sees black as the foundation of all drawing, and thus painting, and, since 1969, has developed the practice he calls outrenoire, ‘beyond black’, in which he harnesses the play of light on the textures of his painted surfaces by scraping and digging, perhaps burnishing, to create suggestions of forms and prompt emotional responses. He likes his paintings to hang in the middle of rooms: ‘When we see a painting on a wall, it’s a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall. A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite —it should look inside of us.’
It comes as a surprise to learn that he is also the designer of the actual windows that give pilgrims to the Romanesque abbey-church of Ste Foy in Conques, Aveyron, France, such feelings of serenity. There, he used black merely to outline and contain the serenity of milky glass. Another Soulages hallmark is that, instead of giving his paintings titles, he records them by their dates.
At least three French presidents, Chirac, Hollande and Macron, have been admirers of Soulages. He also has a strong following in the US, where canvases have made about $20 million at auction. Among a group of works from the post-war New School of Paris abstract painters at TEFAF New York, which returned to the Park Avenue Armory two weeks ago, was Soulage’s 2 Octobre, 2019, offered by the international dealer Emmanuel Perrotin. It had not sold at the time of writing, but sales from this group included works by the Norwegian AnnaEva Bergman (1909–87) (Fig 1), and one by her first and third husband, the German-french Hans Hartung.
Another sale at the TEFAF preview was François-xavier Lalanne’s Hippo Bar (Fig 4), offered by Kamel Mennour, a contemporary dealer with galleries in Paris and London.
At home, the members of LAPADA (otherwise the Association of Art & Antiques Dealers) have been searching their stock for suitable Platinum Jubilee
offerings. Several, including John Bly of Tring, Hertfordshire, Butchoff of Kensington Church Street, W8, and the Mayfair Gallery, South Audley Street, W1, have come up with pieces of furniture that were once at Windsor Castle.
Bly’s Regency carved giltwood sofa is covered in pink silk damask, but the original material was blue, as it was very probably part of a suite designed by George Smith for the Blue Drawing Room at Buckingham House, supplied by Tatham, Bailey & Saunders in 1812 (Fig 3). Later, it was moved to Windsor Castle, when it was presumably re-covered, and there is a Windsor stamp on a stretcher.
On June 17, 2020, I illustrated an elaborate centre table designed by Pugin for the Windsor refurnishing undertaken by Morel & Seddon in the 1820s. It was part of an online display for London Art Week for which Butchoff took a royal theme. Now the dealer has a more restrained amboyna wood side table with ormolu mounts from the same commission (Fig 5). This has several Windsor stamps, as it was moved from room to room on various occasions. One of the stamps is for an inventory carried out in 1866, which also includes the pair of handsome neo-classical standing corner cupboards now with the Mayfair Gallery at £22,000 (Fig 6). These have curved doors, marble tops and gilt mounts. The Bly and Butchoff pieces are ‘price on request’.
Christopher Clarke of Stowon-the-wold, Gloucestershire, specialist in campaign furniture and military objects and art, presents a 14in by 20¾in watercolour, which may have had a royal admirer. On May 28, 1932, Queen Mary visited Fortnum & Mason to see ‘charming pictures by Major Wymer of various uniforms of the army & change during the various years’. This one shows Grenadier Guardsmen in various 19th-century uniforms posed before Windsor Castle (Fig 4). Reginald Augustus Wymer (1849– 1935) had a long army career, but mostly in militia battalions, allowing him to build up a considerable painting practice.
Queen Victoria owned an elaborate watercolour of a parade at Windsor and there are a number of other studies and finished works in the Royal Collection.
Next week Smoke and mirror