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Pierre Soulages and the Status of Gesture in Postwar France

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Pierre Soulages and the Status of Gesture in Postwar France 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
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