Peinture 200 x 265 cm, 20 mai 1959 (Painting 200 x 265 cm, 20 May 1959)

Pierre Soulages

May 20, 1959

Pierre Soulages was associated with the French postwar movements "art informel" and "tachisme," two subtly distinct terms coined by two different French critics that nonetheless describe similar forms of abstraction in which effects of spontaneity, including the gestural brushstroke, became a metaphor for the isolated individual searching for meaning in the aftermath of World War II. Made in the late 1950s, Peinture 200 x 265 cm, 20 mai 1959, however, seems to resist such psychological or politicized interpretations. Although abstract, it does not evoke an act of spontaneous free expression, but rather, with its controlled clusters of black and blue strokes applied with a flat, hard-edged tool, it suggests a deliberate and methodical process. As suggested by the title, which simply chronicles the medium, dimensions, and date of the painting’s creation, the painting refers primarily to the closed and systematic terms of its own production, emphasizing its status as an object rather than an expression of a subjective state. For Soulages this overt defiance of symbolic or even subjective meaning may have been a way of carving out a space of intellectual freedom during the Cold War, when cultural propaganda was at a peak. [Exhibition label, 2015]

Artist Pierre Soulages (French, 1919–2022)
Title Peinture 200 x 265 cm, 20 mai 1959 (Painting 200 x 265 cm, 20 May 1959)
Date May 20, 1959
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions unframed | 78 5/8 x 104 5/16 in.
Credit line Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard K. Weil, 1961
Object number WU 3922

Technique oil painting
Work type painting
Theme Abstraction

From Picasso to Fontana: Collecting Modern and Postwar Art in the Eisendrath Years, 1960–1968
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/23/2015 - 04/19/2015

Made in France: Art from 1945 to the Present
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/17/2003 - 04/20/2003

International Abstraction: Art of the 1950s from the Washington University Collections
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/22/1999 - 03/28/1999

Modernism at Midstream: From Europe to America and Back Again
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 09/04/1983 - 11/06/1983

Washington University Collection of Modern Paintings and Sculpture from Daumier to Pollock
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 04/06/1966 - 05/08/1966

Soulages
New Gallery, Hayden Library, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 01/10/1962 - 01/30/1962

A Galaxy of Treasures from St. Louis Collections
Saint Louis Art Museum, 01/18/1961 - 02/13/1961

1961
Mr. and Mrs. Richard K. Weil, St. Louis

Inscription Recto, lower right, in black paint:

Inscription [on verso at C of stretcher, white rectangular label] [printed in black:] [black horizontal bar at top] / KOOTZ / GALLERY / NEW YORK / [black horizontal bar at bottom]

Inscription [on verso at UR of canvas, written in green paint or pencil:] 20.5- / 1959

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