Traces of Presence: Pierre Soulages and the Status of Gesture in Postwar France

An Honors Thesis for the Department of Art and Art History

Nolan Jimbo

Tufts University

Medford, Massachusetts

2015

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1: Soulages and Prehistory 13

CHAPTER 2: Soulages and Michaux: Enigmatic Signs 32

CONCLUSION: Outrenoir 55

ILLUSTRATIONS 64

BIBLIOGRAPHY 86

1

Introduction

Linked by laws as clear as classical thought and as simple as musical numbers, the characters follow one another, cling together, and interweave to form an irreversible web, unyielding even to the hand that wove it. No sooner inscribed in the surface – which they penetrate with intelligence – than, stripped of the inessentials of shifting human intelligence, they become thought of the stone of which they take the grain…They scorn to be read…They do not express, they signify, they exist.

- Victor Segalen1

When asked to describe his painting, Pierre Soulages often points to this text from French poet Victor Segalen’s Stèles, a collection of prose poems that imitate Chinese steles. Like the monuments described by Segalen, Soulages’s paintings from 1946 to 1978 present forms linked together in a stable, harmonious web, creating compositions that are at once asymmetrical yet balanced, dynamic yet static. Just as the stone inscriptions within Segalen’s text seem to

“become thought of the stone of which they take the grain,” so too do Soulages’s painted forms sit so firmly and unshakably on the canvas that they seem to exist as integral parts of the surface rather than as results of human activity. In their unwavering monumentality, Soulages’s paintings conceal the gestural movements that created them – “they scorn to be read” – and, instead, exist solely as the traces of gesture, the memories of an act that can never be fully recounted. Taking this gap between material presence and gestural performance as my topic, this thesis will examine and elucidate the ways in which Soulages’s paintings generate paradoxical feelings of presence and absence, embodiment and disembodiment, and proximity and distance through their freezing of gesture into trace.

1 Victor Segalen, Stèles, quoted in Bernard Ceysson, Soulages (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1980), 5. 2

***

Brou de noix sur papier, 63.5 x 48.5 cm (fig. 1) is a painting comprised of black walnut stain applied upon delicate, soft paper measuring 63.5 by 48.5 centimeters – a direct reflection of the material and dimensional descriptions given by its title. What the title occludes, however, are the sweeping brush strokes that generate motion and dynamism across the surface of the canvas

– brush strokes whose movement through space seduces the eye to follow their trajectories across the work. The application of paint is varied throughout; certain brush strokes sit lightly on the canvas in their thinness and transparency, while others weigh heavily on the page in their thickness and opacity. With its sweeping brush strokes and varying translucencies, Brou de noix sur papier, 63.5 x 48.5cm invites a narrative experience of its forms, one defined by progression, and above all, movement. The painting is not initially understood as a cohesive whole but instead, as a series of active horizontal and vertical markings that collide and combine to form what ultimately is conceived as the work’s formal composition.

Peinture 202 x 143 cm, 31 décembre 1964 (fig. 2) rejects the previous painting’s insistence upon narrative and movement. Composed of oil paint on canvas, this painting generates a feeling of stillness through its nearly complete saturation of the canvas as well as its symmetrical organization and the extreme opacity of its colors. The sweeping black brush strokes of the previous painting have been replaced by heavy, nearly opaque fields of thick black and red paint, which have been arranged into four columnar sections of the canvas. The experience of this painting is also marked by tensions between heavy, brooding black and vibrant, fiery red, between opaque and transparent forms, and between the horizontal and vertical orientations of the brush strokes. Rather than inviting a circuitous reading of its forms, Peinture

202 x 143cm, 31 décembre 1964 conveys an experience that is meant to be understood 3

instantaneously, as each component of its composition collapses into a cohesive and comprehensible sign that is understood viscerally.

Completed seventeen years apart, Brou de noix sur papier, 63.5 x 48.5 cm and Peinture

202 x 143 cm, 31 décembre 1964 bracket a period of stylistic transition for Soulages. Initially producing paintings of movement and abstract narratives, the artist adjusted his formal approach to image making throughout the 1950s and 1960s to create works that suppress motion into tense, frozen brush strokes. If Brou de noix sur papier, 63.5 x 48.5 cm invites an experience of sustained optical reading, Peinture 202 x 143 cm, 31 décembre 1964 invites an instantaneous response governed by instinct. The seventeen years separating the completion of these two paintings not only contextualize the formal transformation of Soulages’s oeuvre, but they also witness several historical developments within postwar French history.

***

Recovering from the Second World War, the intellectual landscape in Paris was left with a task of seemingly insurmountable complexity: how could a new French cultural identity be defined in the wake of the Second World War?2 Surrealist poet Georges Henein, in 1941, succinctly captured the magnitude of this moment in French history in writing: “We are living in one of those historical moments sufficiently disagreeable to inspire in everybody a violent desire to get out of it. But we consider that what is most important is not to get out of it, but to avoid getting out by walking backward.”3 Facing two opposing currents – one urging an adherence and honoring of French history, the other pushing for modernization and progressive reform –

2 Serge Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 34. 3 George Henein, Preface to Kamel Telmisany’s exhibition, February-March 1941, cited in Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” 51. 4

postwar France was faced with the tall task of rebuilding a broken and tarnished war victim and creating a cohesive, unified nation. In the following three decades from 1945 to the 1970s, a rapid expansion of capitalism and an ensuing economic boom saw modernization pervade French social realms at a dizzying pace.4 Kristin Ross frames this sudden wave of modernization as a source of conflict with a French society unwilling to give up its pre-war sensibilities:

The speed with which French society was transformed after the war from a rural, empire-oriented, Catholic country into a fully industrialized, decolonized, and urban one meant that the things modernization needed – educated middle managers, for instance, or affordable automobiles and other ‘mature’ consumer durables, or a set of social sciences that followed scientific, functionalist models, or a work force of ex-colonial laborers – burst onto a society that still cherished prewar outlooks with all of the force, excitement, disruption, and horror of the genuinely new.5

In addition to the swift and widespread changes occurring internally, France also witnessed the stumbling and ultimate collapse of the French Empire, beginning with the battle of Dien Bien

Phu in the spring of 1954, continuing through the Algerian uprisings and the referendum on

African independence in 1958, and finally the Evian Accords, which officially announced

Algerian independence in 1962.6 In developing a reformed national identity in the midst of modernization occurring internally and decolonization occurring externally, France looked to a constituency that had earned the country’s reputation as the world’s cultural center – French artists and intellectuals.

In the midst of the war and of German occupation, the Resistance, led by a young Charles de Gaulle, encompassed a substantial portion of the left-wing French intellectual class, a group comprised of artists, writers, philosophers, and scholars interested in maintaining the nation’s

4 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Deconolization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 6. 5 Ibid, 5. 6 Ibid, 7. 5

political autonomy and in combatting fascist ideologies through the distribution of pamphlets, articles, newspapers, and books.7 Traditionally, the French intellectual was viewed as an individual engaged in creative pursuits in the arts and sciences who leveraged his artistic insights to intervene in broader political and social issues, essentially acting as a social critic. This historical role as political activist, combined with their heavy involvement in the Resistance, gave the French intellectual class the opportunity to assume leadership on a national scale in the midst of worldwide terror.8 Following the liberation of France in August 1944, French intellectuals were interested in continuing the work of the Resistance in rebuilding a nation that simultaneously adhered to the model of the old, pre-war society while also adapting to the social and economic modernization of the postwar context.9 Fundamental to this impulse was the belief in France’s creative genius, and its ability to purify the nation and drag it out of the abyss created by the war. However, the creation of a cohesive and unified cultural identity did not occur seamlessly for the French, as several disparate movements emerged within all fields of cultural production, especially within the visual arts.

These emerging artistic movements developed along largely political lines, which, in turn, manifested themselves in aesthetic differences of form, subject matter, and style.

Capitalizing upon a period of popularity following its crucial role in supporting the Resistance, the French Communist Party, with the support of several artists including Tristan Tzara and

Fernand Léger, promoted Social Realism against the onslaught of “bourgeois abstraction.”10

Characterized by a direct, easily comprehensible aesthetic that appealed to the masses, Social

7 Tyler Stovall, France since the Second World War (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2002), 66. 8 Ibid, 64. 9 Ibid, 65. 10 Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” 43. 6

Realist art often took the form of painting in which scenes of daily life were rendered in a frank, unadorned style from the perspective of the working class, as is seen in André Fougeron’s

Atlantic Civilisation (fig. 3), a painting caricaturing the Americanisation of Europe through scenes of corruption depicted in a comic strip-like style. This Communist-driven Social Realism was not only a response to the internal threat of the French abstract tradition, but also to the external phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism that was developing in the capitalist United

States, a powerful economic and military power yet still a cultural inferior from the perspective of the French.11

Alongside Social Realism emerged L’Homme temoin (Man as witness), a movement that promoted a more populist aesthetic between abstraction and Social Realism that insisted on the importance of the natural man – “an eater of red meat, of French fries, of fruit and fromage, and a girl chaser” – in paintings comprising subdued colors, hard-edged drawings, and hieratic compositions, which is seen in Bernard Buffet’s Homme assis dans l’atelier (fig. 4).12

Meanwhile, Art Informel, a movement spearheaded by art critic Michel Tapié and built upon (though disconnected from) Surrealism, rejected geometric abstraction in favor of a more spontaneous and intuitive form of art making that could express a postwar emotive reality that could not be captured by old aesthetic models. For example, in Jean Dubufet’s Triomphe et gloire (fig. 5), a female nude is rendered grotesquely with gritty roughness and burly proportions, protesting traditional notions of beauty and instead espousing an aesthetic of incoherence.13 As Rosalind Krauss has written, the ultimate purpose of the informe (formless)

11 Ibid, 46. 12 Ibid, 51. 13 Triomphe et gloire, Jean Dubuffet, New York, Guggenheim Museum, December 1950, accessed April 16, 2015, http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection- online/artwork/1137. 7

was to relinquish a world-view dominated by formal categories and to express the shapeless, unfinished, and imperfect qualities of the postwar moment.14

In 1946, Pierre Soulages arrived in Paris after having avoided forced labor in Nazi

Germany through the use of fake papers. Within a year, he submitted his work to the 1947 Salon d’Automne, a storied French institution that witnessed the modernist innovations of twentieth century painting and sculpture, though his work was ultimately rejected. 15 In 1948, three of

Soulages’s paintings, all composed of sweeping black contours similar to those in Brou de noix sur papier, 63.5 x 48.5 cm, were included in the Salon des surindépendants, a juryless exhibition venue and a critical site in the formation of the artist’s practice, as he recalled, “That’s where, for the first time, I saw three of my paintings hung with those of other painters. I was struck by how black they looked in the middle of all that color coming from the other artists.”16

This formal distinction from the work of his contemporaries reflects a unique philosophical approach within Soulages’s practice. Vehemently opposed to associating his work with any variety of movement or group, Soulages said, “When I see a group of artists who have something in common, I am not interested. For what they have in common is shared…When one speaks of a ‘movement’ what interests me is what breaks with it – what goes beyond it.”17 Rather than imbuing his work with political or social agendas, Soulages emphasized the integrity of the work of art as it exists in reality, calling attention to his paintings’ materials: the texture of the canvas, the viscosity of the paint, and the physical dimensions of the finished work, as indicated in his titles, which detail the painting’s height, width, and date of completion.18 However, the

14 Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” October, Vol. 33 (Summer 1985): 31-72. 15 Philippe Ungar, Soulages in America (New York: Dominique Lévy Gallery, 2014), 16. 16 Ibid, 16. 17 James Johnson Sweeney, Soulages (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1972), 28. 18 Bernard Ceysson, Soulages, 12. 8

material elements of Soulages’s paintings do not constitute the ultimate end of his practice. “The reality of a picture cannot be reduced to its material components: frame, canvas etc.,” said

Soulages. “It consists of three elements: the artist who painted it, the painting as object, and the person who looks at it.”19 Although the physical aspects of the work hold importance within

Soulages’s work, the visible traces of the artist’s gestures ultimately facilitate the relationship between the painting, the artist, and the viewer.20 For Soulages, the trace of the gesture is something more than a collision of canvas and paint – it is a site in which notions of presence, corporeality, temporality, and subjectivity converge into a communicative or incommunicative sign.

***

Although Soulages is currently considered one of the most renowned French contemporary artists, his practice has not received the same degree of scholarly attention given to his American Abstract Expressionist contemporaries nor to his fellow Frenchmen categorized into Art Informel. While his resistance to incorporation within into art historical groups has maintained his autonomy, it has also limited the amount of critical attention he has received throughout his career.

Several accounts are worth reading, however. Serge Guilbaut attempts to inscribe

Soulages’s work within a movement to redefine the French cultural identity in the postwar era.

Soulages, he writes,

…was keenly aware of the political situation, of some of the moral as well as politically impossible positions confronting the leftist avant-garde. He was part of a large group of artists who were trying to develop a humble art, far away from and in opposition to the sophistication of French tradition.21

19 Pierre Soulages, cited in Bernard Ceysson, Soulages, 12. 20 Ceysson, Soulages, 81. 21 Guilbaut, Serge, “Postwar Painting Games” 54. 9

This account of Soulages’s work frames the origins of his practice as a conscious attempt to distance painting from its history within French culture. Implied within this analysis is the formation of a new postwar model of art making that rejected France’s historical cultural tradition, suggesting that the future of the French cultural identity must be built upon a radically new and progressive foundation. Additionally, Guilbaut’s analysis imbues Soulages’s paintings with a nationalist twist, as his assertion that the artist’s work is a reaction to “the sophistication of French culture” implies that the work should first and foremost be understood as a French painting, rather than as a painting that resists cultural categorization. Rather than integrating

Soulages into the context of postwar France in order to draw out similarities between his work and that of his contemporaries, my thesis gives primary attention to Soulages’s unique treatment of gesture and emphasizes the aspects of his practice that make him distinctive within his historical moment.

In the recently published catalogue, Soulages in America, Philippe Ungar also emphasizes Soulages’s cultural connection to France through his examination of the artist’s reception within the United States, specifically New York, where the majority of his work was sold during the early stages of his career throughout the 1950s and 1960s through the Kootz

Gallery.22 Again, Soulages’s work is explained through a nationalist framework in which the cultural identity of the artist is highlighted in discussing his unique success within the postwar

American art market as a European artist whose formal approach to painting represented a connection both to the Abstract Expressionists and to the School of Paris. In contrast to Ungar’s method, this project takes a less biographical approach to Soulages’s practice, neglecting the

22 Ungar, Soulages in America, 8. 10

market reception of his paintings in favor of examining the artist’s work through formal, philosophical, and historical analysis.

Soulages has not only been fixed within a French identity, but he has also been grouped into Art Informel, which has occasionally been simplified as the “Parisian equivalent of Abstract

Expressionism.”23 Rather than discerning meaning from Soulages’s national roots, this thesis will examine the artist’s work using postwar France, particularly the unstable state of its cultural identity within the visual arts, as a context as opposed to an explanation for the work. In

Soulages, James Johnson Sweeney follows this model in incorporating Soulages’s French identity as a simple biographical detail, and in ultimately focusing his text on the formal development of Soulages’s paintings from 1947 until 1972.24 While Sweeney’s treatment of

Soulages’s work deals broadly with several formal aspects of the paintings including their materiality, their size, and their use of color, among others, my thesis emphasizes the treatment of gesture within Soulages’s oeuvre.

In its treatment of gesture, Carrie Noland’s Agency and Embodiment provides an innovative multidisciplinary account that merges dance theory, cognitive science, and phenomenology in its examination of the ways in which culture is embodied within and disputed by corporeal performances of gesture. Noland defines gesture as “a performative – it generates an acculturated body for others – and, at the same time, it is a performance – it engages the moving body in a temporality that is rememorative, present, and anticipatory all at once,” and interprets it as an experience of kinesthesia that challenges the social conditioning a body receives, and that ultimately generates variations in cultural practice – that is, rejection of the

23 Robert Atkins, ArtSpeak : A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 to the Present (New York: Abbeville Press, 1997), 45. 24 Sweeney, Soulages. 11

routine. 25 Building on Noland’s analysis of the performative aspects of gesture, this thesis deals with the aftermath of gesture, taking into account Soulages’s gestural movements but ultimately placing greater emphasis on the trace of his gestures, which provide a more productive and nuanced analysis of his work.

***

Considering the artist’s insistence on the political neutrality and creative independence of his work, this thesis frames Soulages’s early paintings in relation to unexpected contemporaries.

Comparison with the Lascaux cave paintings and Henri Michaux’s drawings provide a stage on which to argue that the traces of the artist’s gestures generate both presence and absence, paradoxically fluctuating between enactments of embodiment and disembodiment through their relation to Soulages’s gestural movements.

In Chapter 1, I examine Soulages’s paintings from the 1940s and 1950s in relation to the recently discovered Lascaux cave paintings, drawing upon the philosophical claims of Maurice

Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and André Leroi-Gourhan to argue that Soulages’s work shares with prehistoric images a presence that is based in feelings of proximity and tangibility, yet this momentary feeling of intimacy and nearness to their ritualistic context ultimately folds into perpetually insurmountable distance. The presence of Soulages’s paintings, like that of the

Lascaux cave paintings within the accounts of Blanchot and Bataille, fluctuates between tangible accessibility and temporal inaccessibility.

In Chapter 2, I juxtapose the works of Soulages and Michaux, highlighting the coherent tensions in their approaches to materiality, temporality, and corporeality to illustrate the myriad of ways in which gesture could be used as a means of revealing or concealing the trace of the

25 Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 17. 12

body, as well as a means of accelerating or decelerating time. Ultimately, I argue that gesture is a means of both embodiment and disembodiment within Soulages’s work, for the traces of his gestures both record and subsume the movements that created them. In relation to Michaux’s practice, I argue that gesture points to, but does not fully capture, the presence of the body within his drawings, and could also serve as a means of generating a new, virtual body.

13

Chapter 1 Soulages and Prehistory

What interests me is the trace of the gesture on the canvas. The gesture itself means little to me.

- Pierre Soulages (1976)26

On September 12, 1940, four adolescent boys ventured towards a towering hill south of the French town of Montignac with the intention of unblocking a hole in the terrain. Upon digging through layers of dirt and enlarging the underground passage, the boys threw a stone down the narrow hole they had unearthed and with a several second interval between drop and thud, realized that the hole was deep. Their curiosity piqued, the boys ventured into the underground opening, crawled through a series of obstructed spaces, and ultimately stumbled upon subterranean passageways that, once illuminated, revealed mysterious and seductive images that seemed at once familiar yet belonging to another time altogether. The caves of

Lascaux had been found.

Lining the walls of the caves, in black, red, and brown pigments, were paintings, some

17,000-years old, of horses, cattle, and prehistoric man. In between these figurative images were gathered seemingly stray collections of lines, marks and scratches that did not constitute any recognizable forms of nature. 27 Their interpretation remains controversial, but one way to understand these painted imprints is simply as recordings of a gestural impulse – a desire to mark a surface with pigment. The contours of Lascaux’s markings, figurative or not, appear raw and unfinished in their thickness and roughly textured surface, conforming to the jagged lining of the cave walls.28 In their tangibility – that is, in their coarseness and the rudimentary quality of their

26 Pierre Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, Pierre Soulages, 74. 27 Norbert Aujoulat, Lascaux: Movement, Space, and Time (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2005), 266. 28 Ibid, 267. 14

materials – the traces of these gestures convey a sort of proximity to the gestural movement that created them, almost rendering prehistoric man present and immediate before the viewer.

These Upper Paleolithic period paintings, which have been famously mythologized as the

“birth of art,” represented a monumental landmark in the history of human creativity and subsequently reverberated as objects of interest within twentieth century European artistic and philosophical circles. Henri Breuil noted,

The greater mass of the public, except for a very few individuals, were not interested in cave art, which is not easily appreciated or even deciphered, being in caverns where access is difficult and sometimes dangerous. The extraordinarily fine state of preservation at Lascaux, a true jewel of Quaternary Art, by kindling the admiration of non-experts as well as that of specialists, has definitely introduced Prehistoric Art to the horizon of every educated man. 29

As Breuil noted, the discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings in 1940, therefore, generated a more widespread interest in prehistoric painting that had previously been reserved to

“specialists,” as denoted by Breuil. This new access to images from thousands of years in the past coincided with the commencement of World War II, which had begun just a year prior with the German occupation of France. During the postwar period, these images of Lascaux continued to spread throughout French intellectual and artistic circles, offering inspiration from the distant past as the nation considered its cultural future.

Among these artists was Pierre Soulages, who came across reproductions of the Lascaux cave paintings and the Altamira cave paintings in Spain during the early stages of his career in the late 1940s and early 1950s.30 Soulages, reflecting upon prehistoric man’s impulse to paint within the depths of caves, associates his preoccupation with black with his interest in primitive

29 Henri Breuil, Quatre cents siècles d’art parietal: Les Cavernes ornées de l’âge du renne, ed. Fernand Windels; trans. Mary E. Boyle as Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979), 17. 30 Zoe Stillpass, “Pierre Soulages,” Interview Magazine, May 2014, accessed November 20, 2014, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/pierre-soulages/. 15

forms of art, as he remarked, “It’s fascinating to think that as soon as man came into existence, he started painting. I’ve always loved black, and I realized that, from the beginning, man went into completely dark caves to paint.”31 Soulages’s earliest paintings from the 1940s, such as Brou de noix sur papier 60.5 x 65.5 cm (fig. 6), possess formal similarities to the cave paintings in

Lascaux. In this painting, sweeping black linear forms made of walnut stain flow across the surface of the paper, colliding at acute angles to create a composition that is at once dynamic and static. The brush strokes possess a raw and seemingly unfinished quality, however, as the black hue of the walnut stain is interspersed with shades of rust and orange and the edges of the linear forms dissolve into the paper. Meanwhile, the cave paintings of Lascaux, such as the image of a deer located in the Main Hall (fig. 7), possess a similarly rustic surface, as the black pigment is mixed with the brown and beige earth tones of the cave wall and the contours of the deer have rough, and in certain areas, jagged edges.

Beyond his work’s formal connection to prehistoric painting, Soulages associates prehistoric cave painting with the birth of the impulse to paint – with prehistoric man’s original, perhaps instinctive, decision to mark a surface with pigmented material. In this sense, Soulages began to consider gesture as an object of artistic investigation, connecting Paleolithic man’s desire to mark cave walls with his own impulse to paint canvases. It was the birth of gesture as trace.

***

In analyzing Soulages’s work in relation to the Lascaux cave paintings, this thesis does not intend to chart a linear path of stylistic influence or chronological series from prehistoric images to postwar painting. Rather, my intention is to discern meaning from Soulages’s

31 Ibid. 16

connection to prehistoric cave painting in a way that addresses both the historical age difference between the works examined, but also in a way that takes into account the contemporary visual experience of these ancient objects.

Soulages was far from alone in connecting prehistoric images with modernity. Across the

Atlantic, Alfred Barr supported the relevance of prehistoric images in the twentieth century, suggesting that in order to understand a modern artist, “it is necessary in many cases to understand what he admires, whether it be a Tang figurine, a French primitive, or Raphael.” He continued, “Now understanding doesn’t necessarily imply archeological knowledge, but it does require visual experience, and more valuable still, comparison of various artistic experiences.”32

In opposition to a purely chronological, linear understanding of artistic development, Barr advocated for a consideration of the wider visual culture surrounding an artist in drawing connections and references within the work. In the postwar period, in which, as Jean Baudrillard described, “societies are bent on speeding up the emission of bodies, messages, and processes in all directions…with the help of modern media,” artists were inundated with images and were inscribed within a world saturated with visual noise to an unprecedented extent.33 To Barr, this hyper-saturation of visual stimuli expanded the sources of inspiration for the contemporary artist, as he wrote, “…the whole history of art as well as much scientific and psychological knowledge is available to the contemporary painter. He picks and chooses what he wishes.”34 Rather than charting a sequential and chronological connection between artists and their sources of interest,

32 Alfred H. Barr Jr., “Understanding Modern Art,” Wellesley Alumnae Magazine, June 1929, 304, cited in Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), 160. 33 Jean Baudrillard, “Hot Painting: The Inevitable Fate of the Image,” cited in Guilbaut, Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-1964, 19. 34 Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art?, 162. 17

Barr advocated, instead, for a consideration of influences not only outside the immediate time period of an artist, but also beyond the limited field of the history of art.

Barr demonstrated the modern availability of images as distant as those of the Paleolithic period by staging the exhibition, Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa (1937) at The

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This exhibition featured reproductions of prehistoric rock art pictures found in Egypt, the Sudan, South Africa, Scandinavia, eastern Spain, and southern

France in the form of watercolor paintings and photographic prints rendered by a copyist, thus making these objects at once ancient and modern.35 Presented concurrently with this exhibition was Twelve Modern Paintings (1937), which included early twentieth-century European works displaying “advanced abstractionists like Klee, Miro, Arp, and Masson.”36 By exhibiting

Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa in the first three floors of the museum and

Twelve Modern Paintings on the fourth, Barr utilized the replicated images of prehistoric art as an innovative entry point for MoMA viewers to access and understand the complexities of the modern, “advanced abstraction” of the 1930s.37 Through what Barr called a “comparison of various artistic experiences,” the museum’s visitors were expected to connect their viewing experience of prehistoric images – an experience that requires little prior art historical knowledge and insists, rather, on the visceral reaction to the pictures’ inexplicable “magic” – to their perceptions of seemingly inaccessible modern paintings.38

Barr’s decision to present an exhibition related to prehistoric art within the context of a contemporary art museum indicates an ambitious attempt to advocate for the relevancy of

35 Ibid, 138. 36 Ibid, 148. 37 Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art?, 154. 38 Alfred H. Barr Jr., preface to Leo Frobenius and Douglas C. Fox, Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa, from Material in the Archives of the Research Institute for the Morphology of Civilization, Frankfort-on-Main (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937), 9-10. 18

prehistoric images within art making of the present. In justifying his curatorial decision, Barr wrote, “The artwork stands, then, not only as an envoy from the past but also as a living force – a visual experience – in the present,” for he proposes that images inherently possess a lively and seductive quality that is divorced from the temporal distance it may have from its viewer. By lobbying for this transhistorical quality of visual experience, Barr suggested that the prehistoric images of cave painting, like those of Lascaux being viewed by Soulages, possess a presence that transcends temporal barriers and maintains their vitality – their “living force” – in contemporary contexts.39 Similar to the way in which Barr claimed that prehistoric cave painting is more than just “an envoy from the past,” this thesis considers the contemporary paintings of Soulages in relation to the prehistoric images of Lascaux, which carry a “living force,” – a presence – that persists through time and continues to exist in our modern age.

***

In the years following World War II, France’s cultural identity was in a state of reconstruction. In addition to living through the unprecedented violence of the Second World

War, artists in postwar France were also being confronted with gruesome images of suffering and savagery due to the emergence of modern forms of media. As Jean Baudrillard noted, “we must bear in mind the effect on the collective imagination during and after the last war of the many violent and ghastly pictures that conflict produced. Events and…their representation – above all visual – gave rise to deep trauma throughout the world.”40. The widespread proliferation of these images of war within France, which only augmented and prolonged the trauma of the bloody and horrific affair, pushed artists to react through the formation of new cohesive movements. In addition to these pressures within the French domain, the nation’s

39 Ibid, 161. 40 Baudrillard, “Hot Painting: The Inevitable Fate of the Image,” 22. 19

identity also faced scrutiny from the exterior, as the world was watching to see whether France, previously the cultural center of Europe, could recover its former glory. According to Serge

Guilbaut, “Paris, which had lost her political and economic strength, could not afford to lose her cultural prestige as well.”41 Amidst this struggle, Paris’s visual arts scene lacked a cohesive center. Despite the abundance of emergent movements within the French visual art scene, ranging from Art Informel to a Communist-driven Social Realism, Soualges chose to remain independent and to maintain autonomy in his practice. “If an artist interests me,” he explained,

“it is because he is unique, original, irreplaceable, not because of what he shares with his colleagues. When one speaks of a ‘movement’ what interests me is what breaks with it – what goes beyond it.”42 In the midst of political turmoil and conflict that was often tied to aesthetics,

Soulages made the conscious decision to abstain from political references or allegiances within his work.

However, in removing himself from these debates, Soulages proposed his own vision of the way in which postwar artists should react to the devastation of World War II – one in which artists extricate themselves from the political and social chaos of the present and, instead, look to the past – that is, to the beginning of human art making. According to Guilbaut, this impulse to free painting from the turmoil of the present manifested in Soulages’s desire to return the medium to its most fundamental roots: “For Soulages, painting had to relearn how to breathe, to walk, to talk.”43 In consideration of an art that returned to its prehistoric origins, André Leroi-

Gourhan postulated, “Trying to find a way out by going back to the beginnings of time goes together with rejecting that part of the development of art during which symmetry and

41 Serge Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” in Guilbaut, Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-1964, 34. 42 James Johnson Sweeney, Soulages (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1972), 28. 43 Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” 54. 20

perspective were developed and values became ordered in a narrative succession.”44 Therefore,

Soulages’s desire to escape the boundaries of his postwar present had to be fulfilled using an abstract, non-figurative language that resisted the artistic developments of “symmetry,”

“perspective” and “narrative succession,” which had developed since the origins of painting.

Soulages’s proposal of a painting devoid of contemporary references that looks back in time came during a point in French history in which the notion of history itself was being contested. Following the historical traumas of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, history had, as

Baudrillard wrote, “reached its acme, it became saturated, the resultant explosion led to a freezing up that, in turn, led to implosion. Since it was impossible to advance, to go further, war froze…War, and history with it, somehow suspended, satellized, hyperrealized.”45 The process of history, described by Baudrillard as a “kind of condensation, a significant crystallization of events,” had reached a saturation point during the war and had ceased to progress meaningfully due to the relentless pace of modern society.46 In this moment of reconstruction following the horrors of World War II, it was as if history had ceased to move. Baudrillard’s claim is built upon the theory proposed by Elias Canetti, “that beyond a certain precise point in time, history ceased to be real. As if, without being aware of it, the whole human species had suddenly taken off from reality. Everything that happened since has been untrue, but without our knowing it.”47

The concept of a reality freed from the pressures and permanence of history poses the fundamental question: how does one progress from a time period that no longer carries any

44 André Leroi-Gourhan, “The Language of Forms: The Nonfigurative,” in Gesture and Speech (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 397. 45 Jean Baudrillard, “Hot Painting: The Inevitable Fate of the Image,” 17. 46 Ibid. 47 Elias Canetti, The Human Province (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), . 21

historical weight? During this moment of seemingly total historical saturation, how does one move forward and create meaning out of gesture?

Again, events across the Atlantic provide a useful comparison. Within the field of the visual arts in the 1950s, New York witnessed the Abstract Expressionists formulate a “hot” abstraction, “a vehement manifestation, a challenge, a shout – expressionist in the sense of expressing, expulsing, in the sense of the exorcism, the conjuration, of the rejection and the violent bodily extraversion of the world by image.”48 While the Abstract Expressionists reacted to the American postwar climate through an extreme and aggressive aesthetic marked by liberated, unrestrained gestures, Soulages responded to the French postwar context through a subtler yet equally abstract aesthetic defined by controlled and deliberate painterly gestures.

However, Soulages’s practice not only offered a physical response to the historical moment, but also a philosophical reaction: through his restrained painterly strokes and focus on modest, artisan materiality, Soulages aimed to return the gesture of painting to its prehistoric origins – an impulse that manifested in the wake of Lascaux’s discovery.

***

In Brou de noix et huile sur papier 74 x 47.5 cm (fig. 8), Soulages uses walnut stain and oil paint in sweeping, dynamic brush strokes to interweave earthy black lines that construct calligraphic signs in movement. In relation to his early paintings from the 1940s, Soulages likened his brush strokes to a form of handwriting: “Some canvases show an experiment in graphic representation, a sort of handwriting – of movement…the drawing of the branches was intended as a sort of movement in space.”49 Brou de noix et huile sur papier 74 x 47.5 cm

48 Ibid, 22. 49 Sweeney, Soulages, 22. 22

emphasizes the dynamism of Soulages’s brush strokes, inviting the viewer to trace its origin and direction in a sort of narrative reading of the work.

Yet, while this painting may propose a gesture imbued with motion, the modest materiality of the work recalls a connection to nature through Soulages’s use of walnut stain. In describing this focus on materials, Serge Guilbaut suggests that Soulages’s paintings comprised

“a discourse on the variations of application of paint to canvas, a dialogue with the imprint of a marked canvas, a relaxed organic relation between form and artist, a respiratory exercise, breathing life into old structures, in traditionally discarded materials and colors.”50 Through the application of walnut stain, Soulages attempted to return the act of painting to its humble material roots in nature, while his non-figurative, calligraphic brush strokes, created using common housepainter’s brushes, returned painting to the simple gesture of marking a canvas.51

Soulages’s focus on the materials of his craft defied what Leroi-Gourhan saw as “the loss of manual discovery, of the personal encounter between human and matter in the exercise of a craft” that was occurring in contemporary art – a loss that “had closed one of the doors to individual aesthetic innovation.”52 Rather than complicating the process of painting, Soulages intentionally simplified the techniques and materials of his practice as a method of re-connecting the gesture of painting to its fundamentals: the marking of a canvas with a brush. Additionally, the work’s title, “Walnut stain and oil on paper 74 x 47.5 cm,” reveals a focus on these material qualities of the painting. In fact, the title of the painting rejects any narrative or symbolic interpretation in its simplicity.

50 Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” 56. 51 Ibid, 54. 52 Leroi-Gourhan, “The Language of Forms: The Nonfigurative,” 397. 23

In discussing Soulages’s reinterpretation of painting, Guilbaut claimed that one found within Soulages’s work, “the exploration of simple gestures, the discovery of elementary rhythms, the salvation of the tools of painting from storytelling, from a condescending remapping of nature.”53 Through this emphasis on “simple gestures” and “elementary rhythms,” in addition to his use of low key, fragile materials, Soulages aimed to re-envision the entire vocabulary of painting in a way that returned it to its origins – a starting point that could be situated in relation to prehistoric image making. Additionally, in relation to the reimagining of artistic practice, Leroi-Gourhan wrote, “A really new beginning would require humankind to forget the art of the Mediterranean cultures and cease to understand ancient Greece, medieval

Italy, the Flemish, the moderns, all painting – even if it is at odds with tradition – and all music inspired by the maturing of centuries.”54 In other words, Leroi-Gourhan claimed that an innovative conception of art making could only exist if an artist bypassed centuries of art historical knowledge and engaged with his or her practice without previous exposure to the cultural forms of the past. A “new beginning” was impossible to formulate using an already established and historicized vocabulary. According to Leroi-Gourhan, genuine artistic innovation only occurred when the language of the medium – in this case, painting – was reinterpreted at its root. Leroi-Gourhan also problematized the viewing experience of ancient images by contemporary viewers in writing, “To the modern eye, the swarms of animals and signs signify no action except of a most fragmentary kind, and no narration can be detected.”55 Viewing the

Lascaux pictures approximately 17,000 years after they were made, the twentieth century French viewer clearly perceived the prehistoric paintings as images of a distant, primitive past in which

53 Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” 54. 54 Leroi-Gourhan, “The Language of Forms: The Nonfigurative,” 397. 55 Ibid, 396. 24

convincing naturalism and cohesive narrative had not yet developed within the visual arts.

Despite these assumptions and the postwar context of looking, however, the Lascaux cave paintings still possessed an elusive and captivating quality that engaged the interests of viewers in the 1940s such as Soulages. In locating this quality, twentieth century French philosophers such as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille offered variant conclusions in the decade following the discovery of Lascaux, both attempting to rationalize the qualities of presence and trace within the cave paintings and to incorporate these images into the history and logic of human art making.

***

In discussing the prehistoric paintings’ relevance to contemporary society, Maurice

Blanchot wrote, “Lascaux should be both what is most ancient and a thing of today; these paintings should come to us from a world with which we have nothing in common…yet they should nonetheless make us, regardless of questions and problems, enter into an intimate space of knowledge.”56 Although Blanchot acknowledged the vast historical distance between “what is most ancient and a thing of today,” he nonetheless considered the Lascaux paintings to be significant documents of human knowledge that transcend temporal boundaries. Within

Blanchot’s “intimate space,” modern viewers experienced at once their connection to prehistoric man and the fact that these images “come to us from a world with which we have nothing in common.”57 However, Blanchot suggests that these simultaneous experiences of proximity and distance in relation to the Lascaux cave paintings collapse into a presence that continually folds into remoteness – intimacy that is experienced as alienation – when he writes,

56 Maurice Blanchot, “The Birth of Art” in Friendship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 6. 57 Ibid. 25

“The thought that at Lascaux we are present at the real birth of art and that at its birth art is revealed to be such that it can change infinitely and can ceaselessly renew itself, but cannot improve – this is what surprises us, what seduces us and pleases us, for this is what we seem to expect of art: that, from birth, it should assert itself, and that it should be, each time it asserts itself, its perpetual birth.”58

Blanchot claims that the presence of the Lascaux cave paintings is never fully present within a single moment, but is, instead, eternally ephemeral in its “perpetual birth.” In viewing the Lascaux cave paintings from the perspective of Blanchot, the feeling of presence that a viewer experiences is the assertion of the paintings, but this assertion is renewed and reinvented each time the images are experienced. The feeling of presence, therefore, is transitory in that it exists in a constant state of reinterpretation, but it is also located at a perpetual and insurmountable distance from its viewer, described by Blanchot as “the feeling, frightened or joyful, of a communication at a distance and yet immediate that art brings with it, and of which art would be the perceptible affirmation.”59 In his assertion of presence that is perpetually distanced, Blanchot refutes a position held by Georges Bataille, who interprets the presence of the Lascaux cave paintings as a continual apparition of the ritualistic context in which the gestural movements were enacted.

In a lecture given at the Société d’Agriculture, Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts d’Orléans in December 1952 on the topic of Lascaux, Bataille proclaimed,

It was effectively necessary to give the evocation of the animal not only the central value but a tangible characteristic that the naturalistic image alone allowed them to attain. The animal had to be, in a sense, rendered present in the ritual, rendered present through a direct and very powerful appeal to the imagination, through the tangible representation.60

58 Blanchot, “The Birth of Art,” 1. 59 Ibid, 6. 60 Georges Bataille, “A Visit to Lascaux: A Lecture at the Société d’Agriculture, Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts d’Orléans” (delivered in December 1952) in The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 50. 26

While Blanchot frames the connection between prehistoric and present man as a matter of

“knowledge,” Bataille argues that the Lascaux cave paintings communicate with their viewer through an experience of tangibility that is transmitted through their physical and visceral presence. This “tangible characteristic,” combined with the “naturalistic image” of the bison, created the impression that the animal was made present within the cave during ritual preparations for hunting expeditions, and it carries ahead to deliver presence in the contemporary context.61 Through the tangible nature of the markings at Lascaux, according to Bataille, one can access and re-activate the ceremonial context in which these the Lascaux images were rendered

17,000 years in the past:

Now let’s imagine before the hunt, on which life and death will depend, the ritual: an attentively executed drawing, extraordinarily true to life, though seen in the flickering light of the lamps, completed in a short time, the ritual, the drawing that provokes the apparition of this bison. This sudden creation had to have produced in the impassioned minds of the hunters an intense feeling of the proximity of the inaccessible monster, a feeling of proximity, of profound harmony.”62

According to Bataille, the images lining the walls of Lascaux possess a presence that re-activates the ritual, or rather, reenacts the ceremonial conditions in which Paleolithic man created them.

This re-enlivening of the ritual occurs through the apparitional quality of the cave paintings, which is distinct from the “thing” quality of surfaces proposed by Bataille. Within his dual conception of surfaces, the “thing” aspect of a mark imbues it with a lifeless and static quality, designating it as a “durable object,” or inert matter in real space that persists through time while the apparitional aspect, though continually being re-activated, is ephemeral in its re-enlivening of

61 Ibid, 49-50. 62 Bataille, “A Visit to Lascaux: A Lecture at the Société d’Agriculture, Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts d’Orléans,” 51. 27

the context in which the mark was made.63 While he acknowledges this duality of surfaces,

Bataille ultimately gives more attention to the apparitional quality of the Lascaux paintings:

These works were not, by any measure, at any time, objects of art: when one considers the products of every era, nothing is further from what normally constitutes a thing. Their meaning was in their apparition, not in the durable object that remained after the apparition. In my opinion, this is what gives the extreme confusion of the cave walls such charm: the continual, lively negation of the durable object, which, in the end, each and every figure became, without ever merging with the confusion wherein its is lost – which is not reducible to a unity in the sense of a thing.64

In Bataille’s conception of presence as ritualized apparition, there is a constant negation of the objecthood – of the “durable object” – embodied by the Lascaux cave paintings. Apparitional presence makes reification impossible; such that presence can only ever exist ephemerally in its moment of appearing and can never persist thereafter, lest it retreat into thingliness. For Bataille, the presence of the cave paintings is inherently tied to the ritual or the process through which they were created, and is therefore associated with movement, both literal in the ritualistic gestures that generated the marks and virtual in the reactivation of these ceremonies in viewing the images.

This movement-based conception of presence proposed by Bataille, however, was challenged by Blanchot, who associated his viewing of the Lascaux cave paintings with an instantaneous experience of a presence that never exists fully in the present. While Bataille asserts the proximity one feels in viewing the cave paintings of Lascaux is based in a reenactment of their ritualistic context, Blanchot proposes the simultaneous experiences of closeness and distance embedded within the suddenness of the cave paintings’ appearance.

According to Blanchot, the Lascaux cave paintings generate a simulated proximity that

63 Ibid, 76-77. 64 Georges Bataille, “The Passage from Animal to Man,” in The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 77-78. 28

ultimately folds into distance, which suggests that the experience of presence is a mirage.

Blanchot claims, “This mirage, if it is one, would be the truth and the hidden meaning of art. Art is intimately associated with the origin, which is itself always brought back to the non-origin; art explores, asserts, gives rise to…what is essentially before; what is, without yet being.”65 Art within Blanchot’s framework exists in every temporal realm with the exception of the present, as it manifests momentarily as an apparition and immediately dissolves into non-presence.

Within Soulages’s paintings, the division between Bataille’s assertions of tangibility, movement, and proximity and Blanchot’s proposals of suddenness, ephemerality and distance is manifested in a form of painting whose presence is at once accessible yet elusive, as the experience of his painted forms is visceral and immediate while the gesture that created the form is concealed. In Gouache sur papier 65 x 50 cm (fig. 9), a painting completed in 1950, Soulages demonstrated a notable difference in his painterly gestures, which were now defined by stillness and tension. In an explanation of this stylistic development, he wrote,

It was in 1947 that I began to group my brush marks, which had always been large, into a sign revealing itself in a single instant, abruptly. Narrative time – the time in which the eye follows the line – was thus suppressed. The duration of the line having disappeared, time was immobilized in a hieratic sign. In those signs that are made up of summary, direct brushstrokes, movement is no longer described; it becomes tension, potential movement – in other words, dynamism.66

In his post-1947 paintings, Soulages abandons the traces of spontaneous movement within his brush strokes, yet he renders the directionality and texture of these dark linear forms clearly and boldly. In Gouache sur papier 65 x 50 cm, Soulages applied thick black strokes of gouache to create bold lines that intersect primarily at acute or right angles. The movement of the brush strokes has been suppressed and the black linear forms reveal the traces of Soulages’s gestures,

65 Ibid, 10. 66 James Johnson Sweeney, Soulages (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1972), 22. 29

yet they do not indicate the movements behind the gesture. The movement of the painted linear strokes in Brou de noix et huile sur papier 74 x 47.5 cm has been frozen in Gouache sur papier

65 x 50 cm, creating a stable yet static composition of fixed, still forms. In explaining the reasoning behind this stylistic change, Soualges discussed his concerns with his earliest works, in which, “this inscription of the movement, this record on the canvas of the movement of the hand, which invited the observer to retrace it, troubled me: this linear emphasis distorted the harmony, of which I had an intimation, into an expression of sentiment, of feelings: an expressionistic discourse.”67 In suppressing traces of visible movement within his brush strokes, Soulages attempted to eliminate any traces of emotion or sentimentality in his work, though he also created motionless, heavy forms that lie boldly on the surface of the canvas with a sort of monumentality or unwavering dignity. This stillness of Soulages’s forms draws a connection with Bataille’s theory of the Lascaux paintings’ tangible proximity to the viewer, as the structure of linear forms in Gouache sur papier 65 x 50 cm appears to be existing motionlessly on the surface of the canvas, seemingly accessible and palpable in its inactivity.

Whereas his earlier works, such as Brou de noix et huile sur papier 74 x 47.5 cm, invited his spectator to follow the movement of the painted lines, Gouache sur papier 65 x 50 cm presents an image that is meant to be perceived instantaneously as a whole. According to

Soulages, “time was immobilized in a hieratic sign,” and the linear forms seemed to be frozen in a single moment of tension. However, this single moment of “dynamism” also provides the context for the viewer’s intuitive and immediate comprehension of the painted “sign.” The immediacy of a viewer’s intuitive comprehension of Soulages’s paintings seemingly aligns with but ultimately debunks a conclusion reached by Blanchot in which he claimed, “It is the

67 Ibid, 22. 30

impression they give of appearing, of being there only momentarily, drawn by the moment and for the moment, figures not nocturnal but rendered visible by the instantaneous opening up of the night.”68 Although Soulages’s Gouache sur papier 65 x 50 cm conveys frozen gestures that are understood instinctively and instantaneously, this connection between the painting and its viewer maintains its shape through time. Blanchot’s insistence on the ephemeral viewing experience –

“the impression” – of the Lascaux cave paintings opposes the stillness and fixity of Soulages’s painted forms in Gouache sur papier 65 x 50 cm, which seem to preserve and elongate time, or more specifically, their moment of creation, within the dynamic tension of the tightly knit black linear forms.

Gouache sur papier 65 x 50 cm, representative of many aspects of Soulages’s artistic production in the early 1950s, also rejects the academic pictorial tool of perspective through its singularly abstract language devoid of narrative. In critiquing the use of perspective within the history of art, Soulages declared, “I am against the limitations of perspective. Perspective is illusion, it’s the opposite of presence, and art is presence.”69 Soulages’s rejection of illusionism and favor for abstraction devoid of references to reality is, then, inherently tied to the presence of his work – a presence that is transmitted physically in the bold and thick application of black gouache paint, as well as visually in the gestural tension and instability that collapses time and communicates an instantaneous aesthetic impression to the viewer. Within Soulages’s paintings, gestural movement is frozen and embodied within the trace of the gesture, which is ultimately the source of presence. Soulages’s conception of presence is therefore located within the paradoxical spaces of Blanchot and Bataille’s respective readings of the Lascaux cave paintings.

While Bataille described presence within the paintings as the apparition, or reenactment, of

68 Blanchot, “The Birth of Art,” 7. 69 Stillpass, “Pierre Soulages.” 31

ritualistic movements, and Blanchot defined presence as an instantaneous proximity that folds into distance, Soulages’s conception of presence as the trace of his gestures embodies a hybrid of the two, incorporating Bataille’s sense of movement and Blanchot’s sense of suddenness.

Soulages’s paintings, through their freezing of the artist’s gestures into trace, capture and contain the gestural action that created them, thereby pointing to the movement emphasized by Bataille.

The visual experience of these traces of gesture is collapsed into the single moment of their appearance, as they are understood instantaneously and thereby adhere to the theory of suddenness proposed by Blanchot. However, upon their instantaneous apparition, the presence of

Soulages’s gestural traces dissolve into absence, and this absence points to the disappearance of the gestural movement, itself. The traces of Soulages’s gestures remain temporally and corporeally distanced from the movements that created them, producing a paradox that will be explored in the following chapter in a comparison with the drawings of Henri Michaux.

32

Chapter 2 Soulages and Michaux: Enigmatic Signs

What matters to me is the obstinate determination I detect in the organization of the lines and the quality of the carving to make a mark on this standing stone and raise it to the dignity of a sign.

Pierre Soulages70

Experimenting with the possibilities of tracing gesture in the context of postwar France,

Soulages and Henri Michaux both felt an impulse to move paint or ink across blank spaces using an abstract, nearly monochromatic pictorial language. Sharing an interest in the Lascaux cave paintings, both artists interpret prehistoric mark making as a form of sign making – a form of gestural communication. However, this shared conception of gesture as the creation of signs ultimately yields divergent conceptions of gestural movement (or lack thereof), materiality and temporality within Soulages and Michaux’s practices. Occurring along parallel lines as the artists deal with similar themes relating to gesture, the formal and conceptual differences between

Soulages and Michaux’s work reveal more than variances in stylistic decisions made by each artist; they reflect a coherent tension between the two practices that is inscribed within a larger

French cultural structure grappling with the possibilities of gesture in the decades following

World War II. Through the juxtaposition of Soulages and Michaux, this chapter aims to produce an expanded view of gesture’s status within postwar France as an object of experimentation and contemplation.

For Soulages, as indicated by the epigraph, painting is an act that deals first and foremost with the formal qualities of the medium – its texture, its opacity, its color – and it is solely through the effective organization and composition of these elements through gesture that a painting can be read as a cohesive sign. Within Michaux’s drawing practice, the representation of

70 Ceysson, Soulages, 74. 33

gesture is used both as a communicative sign as well as a means of documenting the corporeal movement of the artist, creating a metaphysical body that transcends the limits of the physical realm, and accelerating the passage of time. In this chapter, I undertake a comparison between

Soulages and Michaux, a pair of artists who have yet to be examined side-by-side in previous scholarship, to examine the ways in which their divergent practices treat gesture in relation to the human body and to temporality, ultimately arguing that Michaux uses gesture to fabricate new corporeal identities and to accelerate time while Soulages employs gesture as a means of disembodiment and deceleration of time. The exploration of these coherent tensions between these two artists’ work will ultimately highlight the unique nature of Soualges’s relation to painterly gesture.

***

In 1951, Henri Michaux published a series of Indian ink drawings titled Mouvements, which took the form of an album containing reproductions of sixty-four sheets, a prefatory poem, and a “Postface.” The sixty-four drawings, many of which resemble Untitled (Mouvements) (fig.

10), are organized into four distinct sections, two containing fifteen reproductions and two containing seventeen reproductions with a single blank page separating each section. Through its presentation of reproductions rather than original drawings, Mouvements lacks the material immediacy and tangible gestural presence of the artist. Rather, in being reproduced for widespread publication, the drawings become flat, two-dimensionally-bound forms that can only be engaged with visually and conceptually, thereby acting as forms of writing rather than as drawings.71 The viewing experience of the Mouvements publication thus emphasizes the optical rather than tangible qualities of the drawings, prioritizing the color, shape, size, and spatiality of

71 Noland, Agency and Embodiment,141. 34

the drawn forms rather than the tactile nature of ink’s application upon paper. In their flatness and seemingly intangible existence on the page, the reproduced drawings in Mouvements appear to be at a perpetual distance from the viewer, for they lack the immediacy and palpability of an original drawing while seamlessly replicating its contours. The flatness of the reproductions renders the forms virtualized rather than material, as their meaning is located away from the tangible realm of the page and is instead found optically and conceptually, like words within a book. Staging Michaux’s reproduced drawings alongside printed text, Mouvements further collapses the distinction between drawing and writing, as both expressive forms lie flatly on the surface of the page and both are to be read as signs. Additionally, the four-part, sequential organization of the book adds a narrative effect to the series, as the reader, flipping through the pages in successive order, is encouraged to notice the development of the work from constrained, consistently-spaced markings into more liberated, randomly configured groupings of ink. 72

In Untitled (Mouvements) (fig. 11), Michaux has marked the paper with Indian ink forms that fall into four neatly arranged rows of markings that seem to evoke the contours of a human figure in motion. With their swinging ligaments and tilted heads, these figures resemble humans that appear to be moving, or even dancing. Despite their representation of movement, these figures have also been perpetually frozen in their positions, seemingly photographed and fixed within a single moment of dynamic kinesis. This focus on stillness and freezing of time is echoed by Michaux himself: “Indeed, my early pages were actually presented as pages of signs, that is to say movement that had been stabilized, stopped, interrupted.”73 At once moving and motionless, dynamic and static, figurative and linguistic, the forms in Mouvements embody a multitude of

72 Ibid, 142-143. 73 Catherine de Zegher, Untitled Passages By Henri Michaux, (New York: The Drawing Center, 2000), 163. 35

tensions that ultimately characterize Michaux’s drawings as hybrids – innovations of form that reject straightforward characterization and that draw attention to the inability of language to accurately describe and encapsulate them.

The composition of Mouvements reflects a more specific tension between the kinetic freedom of the hybrid forms and their strict organization within a rigid structural framework. The seemingly moving forms are tightly arranged into a grid-like format, yet they do not challenge the boundaries of their strict organizational frames. In other words, the forms present in these early plates of Mouvements rest statically within their designated positions, adhering to the rigid yet invisible structural grid created by Michaux. The strict organization of the inked forms suggests that they are to be read like words on a page, from left to right, and subsequently in lines from the top of the page to the bottom. The arrangement of these works within an artist’s book only adds to the word-like quality of these drawings, exemplifying Michaux’ constant aim to reconcile writing and drawing.74 Additionally, the context of Michaux’s drawings within a publication adds a dimension of movement to the series. Although the rigidly organized composition of markings in Untitled (Mouvements) embodies a static visual quality when considered on its own, the experience of the work transforms when it is considered within a series that is to be seen sequentially. As the viewer “reads” the images from left to right, and flips through the pages of the book from right to left, the forms are gradually freed from their strict organizational grid and are allowed to exist more loosely in virtual space – a space defined as at once that of seeing and of reading. This is enacted in Untitled (Mouvements) (fig. 12).

In this drawing, the forms have been liberated from their rigid grid and have been imbued with a greater sense of dynamism and movement as they have been rendered more freely and

74 Margaret Rigaud-Drayton, Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 3. 36

spontaneously across the surface of the page. This break from the strict organizational grid changes the mode of viewing, as the experience of the work is no longer similar to reading written language from left to right. Instead, the composition is viewed in its totality, as it is made more immediately comprehensible and dynamic than its text-like predecessor. The markings in

Untitled (Mouvements) (fig. 12) are also significantly larger in scale compared to the miniscule, tightly controlled forms in Untitled (Mouvements) (fig. 11), as their thicker, more elongated strokes mitigate the markings’ resemblance to the human body. In their increased abstraction, these forms are to be viewed as purely visual objects rather than signs demanding to be read as letters. For Michaux, this journey towards a purely pictorial language allows him to leave behind the limited world of words, for language could only ever be culturally specific, whereas his work leaned towards the universal:

On the contrary, it is through having freed me from words, those tenacious partners, that the drawings are frisky and almost joyous, that their movements came buoyantly to me even in exasperation. And so I see in them a new language, spurring the verbal, and so I see them as liberators…a writing unhoped for, affording relief, in which [one] will be able at least to express [one]self far from words, words, the words of others.75

Through his increasingly abstract vocabulary, Michaux developed a “new language” that liberated his subjective mode of expression from the treacherous influences of the unnamed

“others” – a group encompassing any individual other than himself. To a nearly obsessive extent,

Michaux consistently aims to locate his literary and artistic autonomy, distinguishing his own creative voice from the work of his contemporaries.76 Additionally, this impulse to escape from the cultural specificity fueled Michaux’s interest in prehistoric cave painting, which served as a crucial source of inspiration in his attempt to develop a universally legible and comprehensible

75 Postface, Mouvements, 1951 cited in De Zegher, “Untitled Passages By Henri Michaux,” 210. 76 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 146. 37

script.77 During his time living in the south of France during World War II, Michaux acquired numerous back issues of magazines such as Cahiers d’art and Minotaure, which published images of the recently discovered Paleolithic paintings in the caves of Lascaux.78 Michaux believed that prehistoric cave markings contained the kinetic bases of writing and drawing that, according to Carrie Noland, defined “for a generation of modernists both the human body (the shape it had to have to leave behind such marks) and the human mind (the ability to read these marks as signs).”79 While Blanchot, Bataille, and Soulages scrutinized the visual experience of the Lascaux cave paintings, Michaux instead gave critical attention to the corporeal experience of prehistoric cave markings, attempting to mime, with his own body, the gestural movements that execute the markings.80 By imitating the corporeal gestures of Paleolithic man, Michaux hoped to discover a kinetic vocabulary that, when productive of traces, would be universally transparent and comprehensible.81 The drawings within Mouvements are the results of this project to generate a sign-based language grounded in the universally understood action of corporeal movement.

***

The drawings in Mouvements are accompanied by an eponymous poem in which

Michaux frames his desire to create the work as a desire for movement:

Signs not of rooftops of tunics, or of palaces not of archives and dictionaries of knowledge but of distortions, violence, perturbation

77 Ibid, 130. 78 Leslie Jones, “Prehistoric Re-Marks: Henri Michaux’s Visual Exploration Into the ‘Origins of Painting’” (unpublished manuscript), cited in Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 135. 79 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 130. 80 Ibid, 135. 81 Ibid, 130. 38

kinetic desire.”82

Noland recognized that “[The ink drawings] are indexical rather than symbolic or iconic, but only insofar as they register that a movement (the movement that produced them) has indeed occurred. Michaux’s ‘mouvements,’ as he puts it, are a record only of the impulse to move.”83

Mouvements thus not only represents the artist’s attempt to formulate a primitive, universal language, but it also embodies the visible traces of his movements as he draws the work.

Michaux echoes this notion in writing,

Their movement became my movement. The more there were of them, the more I existed. The more of them I wanted. Creating them, I became quite other. I invaded my body (my centers of action and repose)…I was possessed by movements, on edge with these forms that came to me rhythmically.84

Michaux’s account of enacting his “kinetic desire” (“envie cinétique”) proposes that the gesture of movement, as well as the visible trace of that gesture, creates and concretizes his existence within the physical world, as he notes “the more there were of them, the more I existed.”85

However, this impulse to move is also described as a reaction to the forms generated by gesture, as Michaux notes that his own body began to mimic the motions enacted by his drawn forms –

“Their movement became my movement.” Although the impulse to move originally drove

Michaux to create his first mark through gestural movement, he suggests that the marks ultimately began to feed his “kinetic desire” in a sort of feedback loop: his desire for movement led to him to trace his movement, which then amplified his desire for movement, and on and on.

As this systematic approach to mark making suggests the possibility of an infinite, perpetually

82 Henri Michaux, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, ed. Raymond Bellour, Ysé Tran, and Mireille Cardot (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 440. 83 Ibid, 133. 84 Henri Michaux, Mouvements, (Paris: Collection Le Point du Jour, Gallimard, 1951); trans. Michael Fineberg in Guggenheim/Pompidou 1978, p. 71. 85 Ibid. 39

renewed production of drawings, which, in a sense, came to fruition in Michaux’s production of more than 1,200 such drawings, the question of the system’s genesis comes into view: What fueled Michaux’s original kinetic desire?

Responding to what Carrie Noland describes as “the visually impoverished and corporeally constraining sign-making practices of modernity,” Michaux looked to the kinetic body as the source of spontaneous and liberated expression.86 Michaux used corporeal movements, as well as the markings they produced, as expressions of his own subjective and personal experience, as he describes the drawn forms in the eponymous poem of Mouvements as signs “not of archives and dictionaries of knowledge / but of distortions, violence, perturbation.”87 The signs within Mouvements are not designed to be shared or comprehended on an intellectual or emotional level by the viewer, but are, instead, intended to simply document the artist’s “kinetic desire” – his impulse to move.88 However, the trace of movement recorded by Michaux’s forms is also the pathway through which viewers can universally comprehend the work, for the signs produced in Mouvements document the tempo and shape of the body’s movements, though not necessarily the body as found. Rather, Mouvements documents a body that is constantly in motion, or one that is always being constructed and immediately re- constructed.

In their capacity to indicate the occurrence of Michaux’s movement, these traces of gesture can therefore be considered, as previously mentioned, a form of language that connects mankind to its primitive form. Within the history of human sign systems, languages comprised of gestures are believed to predate languages comprised of words, which suggests that gestural

86 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 131. 87 Henri Michaux, Mouvements, p. 72. 88 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 135. 40

forms of communication possess a greater fidelity to the impulses and emotions they signify, as well as a universal comprehensibility that words simply do not.89 Paradoxically, the possibility of sharing this gestural language through drawing is limited by the physical reality of the movements having to be documented and presented as marks. These traces of gesture can only indicate that movement has occurred, and ultimately fail to embody and convey the entirety of the action as an ongoing event. In attempting to formulate and express a new form of language,

Michaux is ironically limited to sharing his invented communicative form through already existing linguistic means.

In Untitled (Mouvements), Michaux locates the significance of the work within his own subjective experience of movement rather than in the trace of the gesture. Whereas Soulages’s

Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 30 octobre 1957 creates the optical effect of spatial depth, Michaux’s

Untitled (Mouvements) is a composition entirely dedicated to the lateral movement of forms across the surface of the canvas. In discussing this series of drawings, Michaux wrote,

But where am I with these signs? Surely not where everyone else is. I made thousands of them two years ago. But were these really signs? They were gestures, rather, interior gestures for which we have no limbs, but only a desire for limbs, ways of tensing, ways of reaching, and all of them executed by lively ligaments, never thick, never weighted down with flesh or closed in by skin.90

Michaux suggests that the emphasis of his work lies not in the material manifestation of the drawn gestures on paper, but rather, in the gestures, themselves, which embody interior, subjective movements. Michaux proposes the impossibility, then, of sufficiently articulating these gestures within the physical, tangible realm, for they can never be “weighted down with flesh or closed in skin.” In other words, the corporeal gestures performed by the artist represent only a portion of the act’s meaning, for the significance of the gesture is only fully expressible

89 Ibid, 133. 90 Henri Michaux, Mouvements, 75. 41

metaphysically in a realm beyond ink and paper. The “interior gestures” performed by Michaux are imaginative and transcendent of the physical, material world, suggesting that the artist is referencing what Noland has aptly named his “virtual body” – one that exists within Michaux’s imagination and yet bypasses the physiological limits of the real human body.91 In expanding beyond the confines of the corporeal realm, this “virtual body” also escapes the cultural conditioning and, according to Noland, the “disciplines of inscription to which it has been subjected since childhood,” which suggests that Michaux, through this disengagement from reality, gains imagined access to his pure, pre-cultural body.92 Gesture, therefore, entails both physical and metaphysical components for Michaux, though the visual transcription of the gesture in its entirety proves problematic.

Considering the simultaneously tangible and intangible nature of gesture proposed by

Michaux, the visible traces of the artist’s gestures are perpetually incomplete. In their inability to give physical form to the “interior gestures” of Michaux, the markings in Mouvements can only share a portion of the artist’s kinetic actions with a viewer. Furthermore, despite their shared modes of movement-based practices, Michaux and Soulages ultimately offer divergent gestural manifestations within their respective works, the former generating optical movement and enacting a metaphysical gesture that can never be seen, and the latter creating paintings of stillness that conceal the artist’s gestural motions.

***

In 1954, Michaux began to use the drug mescaline, which allowed him to experiment with its hallucinatory effects and which profoundly redirected the trajectory of his artistic

91 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 165. 92 Ibid. 42

practice.93 Michaux describes the hallucinatory experience of the drug as one that “multiplies, sharpens, accelerates, intensifies the inward moments of becoming conscious. You watch their extraordinary flood, mesmerized, uncomprehending.”94 For the artist, mescaline afforded him a heightened awareness of what it means to exist within the world – how one feels the passage of time, how one occupies and moves through space, and how one possesses a unique subjective experience of reality that cannot be replicated by another individual. The experience of mescaline is also one of increased speed, as Michaux’s allusions to the accelerated and intensified “inward moments of consciousness” suggests a hurried progression of time. The challenge for the artist, then, became one of translation and representation: how could he share his accelerated, mescaline-induced vision of the world through the written word or through the visual? In “Vitesse et tempo,” Michaux describes the intentions of his writings, drawings, and paintings in writing,

Instead of one vision to the exclusion of others, I wanted to draw the moments which end to end make life, to show the inner phrase, the wordless phrase, the sinuous strand that unwinds indefinitely and is intimately present in each inner and outer event. I wanted to draw the consciousness of existing and the flow of time. As one takes one’s pulse. Or again, more modestly, that which appears when, in the evening, the film that has been exposed to the day’s images, but shorter and muted, is rerun. Cinematic drawing. (“Dessin cinématique”) 95

Rather than producing an effect of transcendence beyond the experience of the quotidian, mescaline activated within Michaux a desire to share the intensified sensation of living within an imperfect reality, a desire to render the “consciousness of existing.” During his third experiment with mescaline, Michaux began to draw, attempting to capture the allusive and fleeting

“moments which end to end make life” in Indian ink. Mescaline Drawings are small, typically

93 De Zegher, Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux, 195. 94 Agnès Angliviel de La Beaumelle, Henri Michaux (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1978), 94. 95 Henri Michaux, Passages (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1950-1963), 50. 43

measuring 40 by 30 centimeters wide, and are comprised of frantic, trembling zigzag lines, points, loops, spirals, and pinnacles, all of which embody a sensation of hysteric gestural movement. Rejecting precision, the Mescaline Drawings take the raw form of scrawled marks that evoke rather than depict the “extraordinary flood” of images that saturate the mescaline- induced mind.96

In a typical example from the series (fig. 13), Michaux created a sequence of scrawls, which have the appearance of seismograph-generated markings that combine to generate the image of a spiral that appears to be frozen in a moment of counterclockwise movement. A different drawing from the series (fig. 14) presents a vastly different compositional model, as

Michaux has saturated the entire paper with black and blue markings, creating a crammed composition filled to the brim with tense and trembling forms struggling for breathing room.

When considered as individual works, these two drawings seem at first unrelated – the former displaying circular movement with a relatively open composition and the latter displaying a completely filled composition evoking constrained motion. However, the Mescaline Drawings are meant to be seen in succession, mimicking the moving pictures of a film. Agnès Angliviel de

La Beaumelle described the Mescaline Drawings as markings of time: “Like a seismograph they record the very rhythm – speeded up by the drug – at which the brain works, tracing out alternating and joining movements, going backwards or sideways on a vibrating background, leaving the mark of an infinite flux which is the measure of the movement of time.”97 For

Michaux, the act of drawing provided a means of physically capturing the intangible concept of the passage of time, as he writes, “All I have done here is to repeat, sort of, on paper, in Indian

96 Agnès Angliviel de La Beaumelle, Henri Michaux, 95. 97 Ibid, 94. 44

ink, some of the innumerable minutes of my useless life.”98 However, his marking of time does not adhere to the world’s natural rhythms, but rather, it obeys the accelerated temporal laws of mescaline. Gesture, within the Mescaline Drawings, is therefore a means of speeding up the movement of time. As Michaux draws his squiggling forms across the page, the movement of his body – the performance of the gesture – is systematically recorded within the marks of the work.

The resulting sketch is at once the embodiment of Michaux’s “kinetic desire,” and an expression of an accelerated perception of time. Additionally, Michaux’s acceleration of time is contextualized within a culture of acceleration defined by the modernization of postwar France, which, according to Kristin Ross, occurred at a “headlong, dramatic, and breathless” pace, reflecting a shared desire for speed within the interior and exterior realms of the artist.99

In writing about the visual experience of mescaline, Michaux not only likens the speeding up of time to the physical act of drawing, but also to the abstract quality of the forms he creates.

He writes in Misérable Miracle, “The abstract: this is a way of keeping moving. The image is an anchoring procedure, the coming back to what is solid. Without images the abstract would not be able to prove itself.”100 The inclusion of recognizable, figurative imagery within Michaux’s drawings would ground the work within a slowness that opposes the inhuman speed of mescaline. He continues, “The image is the proof of this materialization, its landing and its well earned rest. One can advance only by abstraction and repose only in images. With mescaline, images are the plentiful and bothersome epiphenomena, but it is the abstract that counts.”101 In other words, Michaux’s inclination towards abstraction derives from a belief in the non- figurative as an effective means of progression, of advancement. Within the Mescaline

98 Henri Michaux, Passages, 52. 99 Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 4. 100 Henri Michaux, Misérable Miracle (Paris: Gallimard-N.R.F., 1972), 13. 101 Ibid, 66-67. 45

Drawings, Michaux simultaneously embraces and rejects a connection to the real, as he attempts to render the “consciousness of existing” while also accelerating the progression of time. The gesture of marking a canvas, then, embodies a layered significance for Michaux, as it represents both the physical inscription of a kinetic action and the accessing of a virtual body that exists beyond tangible reality, while it also possesses a metaphysical meaning as an accelerator of time.

Within Soulages’s practice, on the other hand, gesture is valued instead as a means of generating the trace of the movement on canvas, which, through its stillness and static quality, embodies a decerlation of time.

***

In Peinture 130 x 162 cm, 6 août 1959 (fig. 15), Soulages layered thick, rectangular strokes of black oil paint above a surface of varyingly deep shades of blue in the background of the composition. Nothing within this painting is neatly categorized: the shades of blue and black vary in intensity in various portions of the canvas, touches of gold interrupt the monochromatic application of black in the foreground strokes, and the layers, themselves, blend one into the other, denying a clear division between foreground and background. Several of the painted gestures within this work are semi-translucent – the edges of the thick black strokes in the foreground remain raw and seemingly incomplete, providing the spectator with a hazy view of the layer beneath whereas the blue background allows the white canvas to emerge in varying degrees of intensity as if natural light was struggling to surface. The orientation of the painted strokes also resists a horizontal narrative. When reading the painting from left to right, one is faced with a limited composition of vertical, static black forms that resist connection, seemingly existing adjacent to one another without any sort of interaction. 46

Peinture 130 x 162 cm, 6 août 1959 marks a clear progression in Soulages’s work when juxtaposed with his earlier walnut stain paintings from the late-1940s such as Brou de noix et huile sur papier (fig. 2) in which linearity and movement define the picture. In stark contrast to the sweeping brush strokes across the surface of the canvas found in Brou de noix et huile sur papier, Peinture 130 x 162 cm, 6 août 1959 illustrates a study in spatial depth, which entices the viewer to gaze first at the thick black forms in the foreground, the translucent edges of which subsequently direct one’s sight to the blue background, where perceptual depth fluctuates at any given point within the picture. In other words, Soulages shifts his attention away from the possibilities of a flat, two-dimensional painting and begins to experiment with the interplay of depths. What is also lost from Brou de noix et huile sur papier is the evocation of movement in the painted forms, which has been replaced by a freezing and taming of movement described by

Soulages as “tension, potential movement – in other words, dynamism.”102 Just as Michaux’s ink drawn figures in Mouvements are snapshotted and frozen within specific moments of time,

Soulages’s abstract forms similarly deny motion, embodying static positions of rigid stillness.

However, the representation of motionlessness within this painting was ironically generated through the artist’s gestural movement. In describing his process of painting, Soulages remarked, “I was actually dancing, as if in a trance. The lines I was painting on the paper were no more than the record of the movement of my hand; they were there to replace the movement that had become as it were the subject of the picture. It was the gesticulation that I was painting.”103 Soulages’s description of his painting process parallels Michaux’s previously cited account of his own process of creating Mouvements, in which he writes, “I was possessed by

102 James Johnson Sweeney, Soulages (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1972), 22. 103 Bernard Ceysson, Soulages 74. 47

movements.”104 Although both modes of mark making are inherently based within the body, as both Soulages and Michaux claim to be recording the occurrence of their own corporeal movements, these two processes of image making also allude to out-of-body experiences that could be considered almost metaphysical – even spiritual. As Michaux is “possessed by movements” and Soulages is “dancing, as if in a trance,” these modes of mark making propose the possibility of a gesture governed not by rationality or intentionality, but rather one dictated by spontaneity and unconscious instinct.

Although both artists created their works through processes in which movement is captured within the painted gestures, they locate the significance of their works within different locations—Soulages within the trace of the gesture, which replaces and subsumes the bodily movement; Michaux within the kinetic act, itself, which holds both physical and metaphysical potential. In Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 30 octobre 1957 (fig. 16), Soulages created a tightly packed composition of black angular forms that were layered over shades of blue. The organization of the forms within two vaguely expressed vertical columns recalls the grid-like composition of

Michaux’s Mouvements drawings, though in this context, the painted black strokes overpower the constriction of the columned structural plan, as they extend beyond their vaguely outlined allotted areas into each other’s spaces. The varying degrees of opacity within the black and blue oil paints, again, generate a visual experience of spatial depth, as the thicker, more fully rendered strokes exist on the surface while the more transparent applications of paint fade into the background. The angular black forms, which create six roughly outlined squares, act as windows that direct the viewer’s gaze into the depths of the canvas, where thin layers of blue struggle for visibility against a dominating layer of black.

104 Postface, Mouvements, 1951 cited in De Zegher, “Untitled Passages By Henri Michaux,” 210. 48

Peinture 195 x 130cm, 30 octobre 1957 emphasizes the trace of Soulages’s gestures through the painted marks left visible on the canvas, but it does not place any significance within the trajectory of the artist’s gestural movement itself. Soulages’s painted forms conceal the gestures of the artist’s hand and yet they draw attention to the traces created by those movements. In other words, the black angular forms, the interplay between varying opacities, and the struggle between black and blue pigment do not reveal specific details of the kinetic act involved in their creation. On the contrary, these elements of Peinture 195 x 130cm, 30 octobre

1957, in their stillness and solidity, reject any attempt to retroactively imagine and visualize the gesture that created them. In discussing the relationship between gesture and the mark it creates,

Soulages remarked, “When you see an enormous brushstroke covering three meters of canvas, you are aware of the gesture that produced it, but the stroke itself has already become one with the canvas, and what interests me is this pictorial incarnation.”105 Soulages is thus interested in the moment of intersection between his gesture and the canvas, for it is that painted instance of time that remains visible on the canvas, and which ultimately informs his next painted stroke.

However, this complete merging of the mark and the canvas comes at the cost of the Soulages’s bodily presence, for the gestural movement has been completely subsumed and concealed by its own trace. While Michaux aspires for a conceptually transparent trace of gesture that is universally comprehensible and that reveals the tempo and shape of the gesture, Soulages aims to create painted forms that conceal details of his gesticulations.

Additionally, Soulages rejects any attempt to value the process of a painting’s creation over the painting itself, as he explained, “tracing the sequence of forms as they emerged and combined on the canvas, detecting the flashes of inspiration and the rubbings out, appears to me

105 Bernard Ceysson, Soulages, 82. 49

to have very little to do with the sudden transformation that took place at one particular moment.”106 According to Soulages, this art historical approach mistakenly assumes a linear, step-by-step progression in the development of the work. Instead, Soulages proposes that viewers engage with his work fully in the present and resist the impulse to retrospectively imagine the gestural actions that created it. However, within Soulages’s practice, the temporal realm of the present is not limited to the duration of a single moment. Instead, the present is considered a perpetually occurring context – one that constantly renews itself in the experience of his paintings. In the context of a discussion of gesture, this insistence upon the experience of a painting in its perpetually present state indicates that Soulages places more importance within the trace of a gesture than the gesture, itself.

***

While Michaux’s drawings deal with a partial escape from the physical reality of a work of art, Soulages emphasizes the material and textural qualities of his paintings. In discussing the importance of the painted texture within his work, Soulages claimed, “Here it is the texture of the surface, either corrugated or smooth, that changes the light and is responsible for the different qualities of light and shade. It is the texture that renders the light now steady and motionless, now dynamic and full of tension.”107 In Peinture 200 x 162 cm, 14 mars 1960 (fig. 17), Soulages created a composition that is anchored in the center of the canvas by a lively cluster of red, yellow, and brown oil paints that combine into a semi-translucent rust. The lone portion of color within this work, this rust pigment (which evokes a connection to the motifs of trees and wood that have long been a source of visual inspiration for Soulages) is enveloped within a dominating

106 Ibid, 81. 107 Ibid, 90. 50

wash of black, which creates a tense confrontation between light and dark.108 However, the dynamism of the painting is not activated simply through uses of contrasting colors, but rather, it results from the interplay between texture and reflected light on the surface of the canvas. In describing his process of working, Soulages alludes to his focus on the light that invades the painting:

When I am actually painting, I am guided neither by the physical properties of the surface nor by the color, but by the light that appears as I work. Let me explain. The mingled shadows and reflections that cling to the countless grooves left behind in the paint by the brush create a light that has an ever-changing quality and color of its own, different from that of the pigment. By contrast, the surfaces that have been crushed and smoothed by the knife reveal another kind of color and light. It is the texture of the surface and the way in which it breaks up the light that is responsible for the color.109

By locating the importance of texture and light within his work, Soulages distances himself from

Michaux, who places little emphasis on the material quality of his ink drawings. Instead,

Michaux derives meaning from the gesticulation, itself, that generated the mark on the page, and he subsequently values these forms as purely optical transmissions. Therefore, the fact that

Michaux distributed Mouvements in the form of an artist’s book should be unsurprising, for the loss of textural and physical properties within the reproduction of the drawing hardly impacts the viewing experience intended by the artist – one in which the reader notices the progression of movement of the forms as he flips the pages of the book.110 Soulages’s work, on the other hand, demands to be seen in person, directly facing the picture, for the trapping of light within the thick, heavy folds of paint is the phenomenon that generates the tension and stillness that define the marks of his gestures. Soulages and Michaux’s differing conceptions of movement extend into the variant expressions of time that are embodied by their work.

108 James Johnson Sweeney, Soulages, 23. 109 Bernard Ceysson, Soulages, 90. 110 Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 135. 51

Soulages’s brush strokes reveal the capacity of gesture to express the deceleration of time. In Peinture 260 x 202 cm, 19 juin 1963 (fig. 18), Soulages has employed the same strategy of spatial depth from his earlier paintings of the 1950s and 1960s, though the color palette has been reduced solely to black. The composition of the painting is anchored by the short, vertical rectangular forms of opaque black paint in the foreground, which exist in tension with the horizontal, transparent brushstrokes in the background.

In rejecting any narrative reading, Peinture 260 x 202 cm, 19 juin 1963 is nothing more than forms and colors structured together by rhythm. According to James Johnson Sweeney,

“Soulages feels that if his painting succeeds without figurative anecdote, it owes this to the importance which he gives to the rhythm – to this ‘beating of forms in space,’ to this ‘cutting of space into pieces of time.’”111 Sweeney frames the concept of rhythm within Soulages’ work as an act of organization – the placement of forms in relation to one another as a means of activating space and dictating time. In describing the blank white space of his pictures as “pieces of time,” Soulages does not suggest the presence of a linear temporal progression within the space, but rather, he implies that each one embodies a separate, disjointed moment.

André Leroi-Gourhan, in describing his own concept of rhythm, suggested that,

“Rhythms are the creators of space and time, at least for the individual. Space and time do not enter lived experience until they are materialized within a rhythmic frame. Rhythms are also the creators of forms.”112 When considered through Leroi-Gourhan’s conception of rhythm, the thick, opaque black forms in the foreground of Peinture 260 x 202 cm, 19 juin 1963 anchor the visual experience of the work, but they ultimately function as reference points for the fundamental subject matter of the painting – the absence of rhythm. Although the black forms

111 James Johnson Sweeney, Soulages, 24. 112 André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 309. 52

are all interconnected within the same structure, their interactions are static and lifeless, as they seem only to exist side by side in each other’s presence, but nothing more. Additionally, the irregular distances between the forms, coupled with the varying sizes, shapes, and opacities of the brushstrokes, oppose the interval consistency inherent to Leroi-Gourhan’s definition of rhythm, which “entails the repetition of gestures at regular intervals.”113 These empty interactions and inconsistent spacing between brushstrokes leave the painting devoid of dynamism or movement – in other words, rhythm. This absence of rhythm, however, translates into the freezing of time and space, as the painting is conceived as a cohesive whole. In other words, Peinture 260 x 202 cm, 19 juin 1963 is not viewed as a series of relationships between forms, but is instead read instantaneously as a single entity. In fact, it was Michaux who described this same instantaneous experience of painting when he wrote, “Paintings, quite different: immediate, total. To the left, also to the right, in depth, as you like. No path, a thousand paths, with no signs for stopping places. As soon as you wish, the painting again, whole. In an instant, everything’s there. Everything, but nothing is known yet.”114 When viewing Soulages’s paintings, the viewer’s experience of the gestural traces is instantaneous and visceral, bypassing concerns for narrative and rhythm, though this moment of comprehension – this temporal present

– is perpetually being renewed, as the trace of the gesture continually conceals the kinetic action that created it.

Soulages’s painting not only offers a static conception of time, but it also rejects any expression of the artist’s subjectivity. When speaking about his work, Soulages frames his

113 Ibid. 114 Henri Michaux, “Interview with John Ashberry”cited in de Zegher, Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux, 163. 53

paintings as nothing more than formal compositions of brushstrokes and markings, as he claimed,

No, painting is neither exhibition, nor representation of a mood, nor a transcription of what I am…What matters to me is the obstinate determination I detect in the organization of the lines and the quality of the carving to make a mark on this standing stone and raise it to the dignity of a sign.115

Soulages’s emotional indifference towards his work distances him not only from Michaux but also from his American Abstract Expressionist contemporaries working across the Atlantic

Ocean in New York City. Peinture 260 x 202 cm, 19 juin 1963, with its tense brushstrokes and monochromatic color palette, lacks the liberated gestural dynamism of Jackson Pollock as well as the visceral, emotive intensity of Mark Rothko.

***

A trace is always the embodiment of a gesture that once was. It is the memory of the action, or the present absence of an action from the past. Within Michaux’s practice, the artist attempts to record the gestures of a body that exists in constant and perpetual motion, ultimately producing drawings that only partly encapsulate the movement of the artist’s body, and which fail to overcome the temporal and corporeal gap between gesture and trace. In Michaux’s drawings, the trace of the gesture points to the ephemeral nature of the gestural movement, and essentially reveals the paradox of attempting to record a movement that can only exist in real time. However, within Soulages’s practice, the trace can exist as the replacement of the corporeal act. It can be the physical remainder of an action that now possesses its own material and virtual presence. By emphasizing the vivid presence of his paintings and replacing gesture with the trace of gesture, Soulages attempts to overcome the limits of representation faced by Michaux.

Recalling Blanchot’s notion of presence as the sudden appearance of proximity that inevitably

115 Bernard Ceysson, Soulages, 81. 54

folds into distance, the traces of Soulages’s gestures fluctuate between presence and absence, between appearance and disappearance, simultaneously embodying and subsuming the corporeal movements of the artist that created them.116 Straddling the line between an assertion of presence and a retreat into absence, gesture within Soulages’s practice paradoxically serves as a means of embodiment and disembodiment.

116 Blanchot, Friendship, 6. 55

Conclusion Outrenoir

I don’t paint with black anymore. I paint with the light reflected off the black surface.

- Pierre Soualges117

In January 1979, Pierre Soulages was at work on a new painting in his Paris studio.

Having labored for hours without feeling satisfied with the work, he saturated the canvas with a thick coat of black oil paint, left the painting in his studio and went to sleep. Upon returning to the work a few hours later, Soulages stood before the painting, gazed at the illuminated folds of reflective black paint, and was struck with a realization: his medium had expanded beyond the material limits of oil paint into something immaterial and intangible – light. Recalling this moment of discovery, Soulages explained, “I realized that I was no longer working with black, but with the material of black, the surfaces of the black, which created a light.”118 Rather than creating images in which painted brush strokes collide and combine to form signs or in which traces of gesture generate an effect of presence, Soulages had now begun to limit his attention to the optical possibilities of oil paint’s very surfaces, studying the relationship between the texture of black paint and the light it reflects. The black mark on the canvas no longer embodied the sole outcome of the artist’s painterly gesture. Instead, it became a material means of exposing and shaping the light that glistens off of, and is reflected by, the paint’s textural folds.

Upon Soulages’s initial presentation of this new body of work (a typical example of which can be seen in fig.19) in Soulages, peintures récentes (1979), his second monographic exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou which showed 38 paintings dating from 1968 to

117 Stillpass, “Pierre Soulages.” 118 Ibid. 56

1979, curators and critics were quick to describe these paintings using the term noir lumière

(“black light”).119 However, Soulages objected to this description. As he later put it:

I didn’t like this name because it suggested an optical effect. I made these paintings because I found that the light reflected by the black surface elicits certain emotions in me. These aren’t monochromes. The fact that light can come from the color which is supposedly the absence of light is already quite moving, and it is interesting to see how it happens. I realized I needed to find a word that could convey the mental field opened up by these paintings.120

It was not until 1990 that Soulages formulated the term outrenoir (“beyond black”) in order to express not only the textural interplay between black oil paint and light, but also his painting’s ability to project into the space of the viewer. This entry into free space beyond the two- dimensional scope of the canvas occurs both physically, in the outrenoir paintings’ projection of light, as well as psychologically, in their ability to engage with the internal realm of the viewer’s psyche.121 Soulages likened the experience of viewing his paintings to that of gazing into a mirror: “A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite – it should look inside of us.”122

Soulages’s creation of the outrenoir in 1979 marks a complete reinterpretation of gesture within his painting, as he abandoned its primary use in making marks on a canvas to assert presence, and ultimately reduced its centrality in his practice altogether, which led to renewed conceptions of depth, texture, and dimensionality in his later paintings. This reconceptualization and decentralizing of gesture within Soulages’s practice shifts the foundation of this thesis, as it renders gesture and the traces of gesture secondary in importance to a previously unacknowledged element of the paintings: light. Through an examination of the ways in which

119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 Pierre Daix, Pierre Soulages, (Neuchâtel: Éditions Ides et Calendes, 2003), 5. 122 Stillpass, “Pierre Soualges.” 57

Soulages’s practice developed after 1979, I hope to add nuance to my argument that accounts for the artist’s more recent approaches to corporeality and materiality.

In Peinture 222 x 157 cm, 28 décembre 1990, black paint completely engulfs the work, leaving visible only thin strips of bare canvas that have been arranged sparsely throughout the composition, which is rigidly organized into planes that have been oriented diagonally in relation to one another. The slopes of the brush strokes as well as the varying angles created by the planes generate a rhythm that is absent from his earlier work. However, rhythm is not created through the application of paint onto canvas, but instead, through a combination of paint that already lies on the canvas. In Soulages’s outrenoir paintings, no longer centrally concerned with the marking of a surface with pigment, gesture is instead replaced by an arrangement of oil paint across a canvas that ultimately structures a dynamic relation not between painter and canvas, but rather between paint and light. Essentially, the notion of gesture as the marking of a canvas that had informed Soulages’s practice since his first paintings from the 1940s had been undone in the outrenoirs of 1979 onwards. Describing this transition, Soulages explained:

My recent paintings are painted with the same black paint – nothing at all has been added to it. But the physics of light that is involved is not the same as is normally found in painting where each pigment reflects only the wavelengths corresponding with its color as a component of white light. Here it is the texture of the surface, either corrugated or smooth, that changes the light and is responsible for the different qualities of light and shade. It is the texture that renders the light now steady and motionless, now dynamic and full of tension.123

While “tension” was located in the relationships between painted forms in Soulages’s earlier work from the 1950s and 1960s, it has now been displaced and re-oriented within the purely optical realm of light in his outrenoir paintings, in which light is rendered “steady and motionless” within the thick folds of black oil paint.

123 Pierre Soulages cited in Ceysson, Soulages, 90. 58

Upon first glance, the strips of bare white canvas appear to be painted grey and white lines that have been applied upon a black background, seeming to exist in the foreground in the work when, in fact, they lie deep beneath several layers of thick, black pigment. By saturating the canvas with black paint, Soulages attempted to illuminate the rare spaces of white canvas, focusing on the interplay between pigment and light that ultimately highlighted the texture of the black paint in his work.124 Born out of this illuminated texture, however, was light that had been caught within the folds of paint, reflected by the white surface of the canvas, and projected outward into the field of the viewer.

In keeping with such extension, Soulages’s outrenoirs were freed from the walls and exhibited within the open space of the galleries. Conceiving his paintings as walls rather than as windows, Soulages preferred to display his outrenoirs in the middle of the gallery, as he did in

Soulages, peintures récentes at the Centre Georges Pompidou (fig. 20), attaching the paintings to the ceiling and to the floor to form a wall-like structure. By existing in open space rather than on a gallery wall, the outrenoirs inherit a three-dimensional, pseudo-sculptural quality that allowed them to be considered tangible objects that could be viewed away from a gallery wall in free space.

This mode of art making, which blurs the distinction between painting and sculpture, recalled the 1960s work of Frank Stella, the American painter and printmaker whose shaping of the canvas, such as in Empress of India (fig. 21), imbued painting with a form of sculptural relief that problematized medium boundaries.125 In writing about Stella’s investigation of the viability of shape, Michael Fried proposed, “Stella’s new pictures are a response to the recognition that shape itself may be lost to the art of painting as a resource able to compel conviction, precisely

124 Ibid, 91. 125 William S. Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 68. 59

because – as never before – it is being called upon to do just that.”126 Similar to Stella’s engagement with the shape of the canvas, Soulages’s experimentation with his outrenoirs’ existence as pseudo-sculptural objects within free space decentralizes the importance of gesture in his work.

In addition to giving attention to the sculptural potential of his paintings, Soulages also began to investigate the textural qualities of the surface of his outrenoirs, drawing a connection between his practice and the ideals of Surfaces / Supports, a group of French artists interested in the basic constituents of painting – its support (stretcher) and its surface (canvas) – that emerged in the south of France following the student revolts of 1968.127 Studying the medium of ink and the surface of a stretched canvas, Surfaces / Supports painter Marc Devade, in Figure No. 1 (fig.

22), allowed ink to soak into a raw stretched canvas, creating a moody, geometric composition that reflected the artist’s craftsman-like interest in the material properties of painting rather than the gestural movements of the artist, himself. In the same vein, Soulages’s outrenoirs, such as

Peinture 293 x 324 cm, 26 octobre 1994 (fig. 23), resulted from the artist’s inquiry into the textural properties of oil paint, specifically its capacity to capture and reflect light.

With the emergence of the outrenoirs, and with an eye towards these other investigations of the object-like nature of painting, Soulages’s practice became newly concerned with the textural properties of oil paint as well as the pseudo-sculptural dimension of the canvases, reducing the centrality of gesture within his work. While gesture in Soulages’s paintings from the 1950s and 1960s constructed dynamic compositions filled with tension and depth through the application of brush strokes, gesture in the era of the outrenoir has been limited to the structuring

126 Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 776. 127 Raphael Rubinstein, “Theory and Matter,” Art in America, September 4, 2014. 60

of paint for the sake of the ultimately emphasized material – light. In Peinture 293 x 324 cm, 26 octobre 1994, the traces of Soulages’s gestures, for the most part, take the form of parallel black lines that serve as the structural framework for light, rather than behaving as the ultimate ends of the painting. Gesture has been overshadowed by considerations of the element of light and of the projection of the painting into three-dimensional space. However, this projection of light beyond the scope of the canvas represents a critical reinterpretation of depth, which, in Soulages’s early work from the 1950s and 1960s, exists solely within the two-dimensional realm of the painting.

In his outrenoirs, Soulages shifted the experience of depth away from the surface of the canvas and into the space between the viewer and the work, as light is reflected by the spaces of bare canvas and projected into free space.

Through this reconceptualization of depth proposed in the outrenoirs, Soulages distanced his work from key components of what philosopher Richard Wollheim, at roughly the same time, called painting as an art. In his theory of “seeing-in,” Wollheim claimed, “I am visually aware of the surface I look at, and I discern something standing out in front of, or (in certain cases) receding behind, something else.”128 According to Wolheim, the spectator’s experience of seeing-in is inherently two-fold, meaning that two layers of visual perception occur simultaneously. However, these two layers of visual perception do not constitute two distinct, separate experiences, but rather, they are “two aspects of a single experience…They are neither two separate simultaneous experiences, which I somehow hold in the mind at once, nor two separate alternating experiences, between which I oscillate.”129 Wolheim’s theory of seeing-in suggests that the human eye collapses multiple surfaces of a visual experience into a single moment, during which varying layers of depth are perceived simultaneously, though in different

128 Richard Wolheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 46. 129 Ibid. 61

levels of intensity. In relation to abstract paintings, Wolheim drew a connection between the duality of vision and the viewing of non-figurative images as he proposed, “the experience we are required to have in front of them [abstract paintings] is certainly one that involves attention to the marked surface but it is also one that involves an awareness of depth.”130 For example, when viewing Soulages’s Peinture 202 x 143 cm, 31 décembre 1964 (fig. 2), the spectator concurrently perceives the textural details of the black and burnt orange paint on the surface of the canvas as well as the virtual depth generated by the irregular opacity of the color fields.

Within Soulages’s outrenoir paintings, however, the projection of light into the space of the viewer problematizes Wolheim’s theory of seeing-in, which pertains only to images restricted to the two-dimensional picture plane of a canvas. In comparison to his work from the

1950s and 1960s in which depth occurs within the painted marks themselves, Soulages’s outrenoirs reinterpret depth as a phenomenon occurring beyond the surface of the canvas in the light that is reflected and projected into open space. By giving up on Wolheim’s version of painting as a strictly two-dimensional art, Soulages formulated an innovative approach to painting that not only nullified the centrality of gesture, but that also expanded the presence of the painting into the space of the viewer, generating a spatial depth in place of the virtual depth created by his earlier paintings. Soulages’s reconceptualization of painting as a pseudo- sculptural means of manipulating light, marked by his initial outrenoir from January 1979, has continued to this day, as the artist continues to interpret gesture as a structuring of light within his images of thick, black paint.

***

130 Ibid, 62. 62

Within Soulages’s early paintings from the 1940s through the 1960s, the traces of gesture were the central objects of contemplation. These gestural traces embodied stillness and monumentality and yet they were paradoxically the producers of a presence that was elusive and in a constant state of oscillation between tangible accessibility and temporal distance, sudden apparition and perpetual dissolution. With the emergence of the outrenoir, Soulages’s practice gave up this centrality of gesture, focusing instead on the interaction between paint and light that occurs within the textural folds of the painting’s surface, as well as the projection of light into the free space of the viewer. In reducing the importance of gesture within his paintings, Soulages reinterpreted several of the qualities of his work that this thesis explored, including the nature of presence that is derived from the traces of the artist’s gestures, the relationship between the artist’s corporeality and mark making, and the possibility of collapsing temporal distance.

However, something has remained constant throughout his career and has the capacity to bridge the gap between two seemingly distinct bodies of work. Soulages once explained that, “Painting is neither exhibition, nor representation of a mood, nor a transcription of what I am. Of course it involves something of all this…but the real purpose of art is elsewhere.”131 The connecting thread between the pre-1979 paintings and the outrenoirs is their insistence upon the “elsewhere” alluded to by Soulages, who employs gesture as a means of distancing himself from the work he creates through the suppression of his own presence, whether it be corporeal or psychological, pointing instead towards this “elsewhere” that exists independently of his own identity. In his pre-1979 paintings, the trace of the gesture subsumes his gestural movement, enacting a virtual disembodiment of the artist. In the outrenoirs, gesture is even further concealed, as the experience of the paintings has expanded beyond the surface of the canvas and includes the open

131 Pierre Soulages cited in Bernard Ceysson, Soulages, 81. 63

space between the viewer and the work. In a technologically driven and media saturated moment marked by unprecedented speed, obsession with authorship, and constant streams of visual noise,

Soulages offers images of silence and stillness in which his own presence dissolves into absence, reminding his viewers that, perhaps, the boldest and most meaningful gestures are those of subtlety, those of removal, and those of disappearance.

64

Illustrations

Fig. 1 Pierre Soulages, Brou de noix sur papier, 63.5 x 48.5 cm, 1947

65

Fig. 2 Pierre Soulages, Peinture 202 x 143 cm, 31 décembre 1964, 1964

66

Fig. 3 André Fougeron, Atlantic Civilisation, 1953

67

Fig. 4 Bernard Buffet, Homme assis dans l’atelier, 1949

68

Fig. 5 Jean Dubuffet, Triomphe et gloire, 1950

69

Fig. 6 Pierre Soulages, Brou de noix sur papier 60.5 x 65.5 cm, 1947

Fig. 7 Deer from the Main Hall (Hall of the Bulls) in Lascaux cave, ca. 15,000 B.C. 70

Fig. 8 Pierre Soulages, Brou de noix et huile sur papier 74 x 47.5 cm, 1947

71

Fig. 9 Pierre Soulages, Gouache sur papier 65 x 50 cm, 1950

72

Fig. 10 Henri Michaux, Untitled (Mouvements), 1950-1951

73

Fig. 11 Henri Michaux, Untitled (Mouvements), 1950-1951

74

Fig. 12 Henri Michaux, Untitled (Mouvements), 1950-1951

75

Fig. 13 Henri Michaux, Mescaline Drawing, 1958

76

Fig. 14 Henri Michaux, Mescaline Drawing, 1958

77

Fig. 15 Pierre Soulages, Peinture 130 x 162 cm, 6 août 1959, 1959

78

Fig. 16 Pierre Soulages, Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 30 octobre 1957, 1957

79

Fig. 17 Pierre Soulages, Peinture 200 x 162 cm, 14 mars 1960, 1960

80

Fig. 18 Pierre Soulages, Peinture 260 x 202 cm, 19 juin 1963, 1963

81

Fig. 19 Pierre Soulages, Peinture 222 x 157 cm, 28 décembre 1990, 1990

82

Fig. 20 Exhibition view of Soulages, peintures récentes, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1979, Paris, Archives Soulages, photograph by François Walch

83

Fig. 21 Frank Stella, Empress of India, 1965

84

Fig. 22 Marc Devade, Figure No. 1, 1977

85

Fig. 23 Pierre Soulages, Peinture 293 x 324 cm, 26 octobre 1994, 1994

86

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