Pierre Soulages au Centre Pompidou

I have to admit I had not heard of Pierre Soulages before I saw the poster for his latest exhibition at the Pompidou Center. This, together with the fact I didn’t feel as though I spent enough time with the later paintings in the final rooms of the exhibition, makes my thoughts and impressions of his work seem incomplete.

My disclaimers aside, as I walked around the chronologically organized exhibition, watching the paintings get larger and larger, I was overwhelmed by how very un-French is the work of Pierre Soulages. French painting of the twentieth century is noticeably characterized by small, compact, quiet, petite. And certainly, Soulages’ Taschist contemporaries, Fautrier, Dubuffet, and so on, are not known for the largesse of their works. Even a painter such as Nicolas de Staël who made four foot canvases did so with a quiet, reflective resolve. There is nothing grand, aggressive or masculine in the form of de Staël’s work. Soulages is a different story: the later paintings might even be described as paint attacking the canvas: they are huge, aggressive, masculine and determined in their exploration of the relationship between black paint, canvas and the light it reflects. There is no quiet contemplation of the kind we see in the Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella black canvases. On the contrary, if we compare Soulages to an American, it has to be the masculine energy of Franz Kline, an energy that is multiplied in Soulages’ severing of canvases with thick black lines.


The early works are fascinating as they engage with materials not usually associated with painting: tar and walnut stain on canvas, glass, paper. The specific quality of these substances, their dilution on paper and their luminescence on glass gives them a substance, a tactility that allows them to show the first signs of what will become Soulages’ trademark of color appearing to emerge from the surface on which it is painted.

Among my favorite paintings were Peinture 202 x 125 cm, 15 décembre 1959 and Peinture 190 x 300 cm, 11 juillet 1965, both painted immediately before Soulages launched into his half century devotion to black. What I love about these paintings, especially the first, is that color is shown to be in a slow process of appearing, Up close it is as though the black has been stripped from the canvas and red is in a process of revelation. There is also an unpredictability to the black and the red, their relationship to each other filled with conflict that might drive them in surprising new directions at any moment. And this unpredictability gives way to a movement, an energy that is in no way harnessed by the rest of the painting as a support to the encounter between black and red, or by the canvas as frame to that painting. In turn, this energy is a force that beckons the viewer to connect with such a painting. In contrast, images such as Peinture 195 x 130cm, 30 Octobre 1957 feel trapped, stultified by the boxed in nature of the black strokes that overlay the color. Black has won the battle over blue, and there is no invitation offered to me to indulge in the vibrancy of he conversation with red, or with honey in Peinture 190 x 300 cm, 11 juillet 1965.


As I moved through the exhibition into the explorations of black, where black comes to dominate his palette and his thinking, I couldn’t help seeing them through the lens of Rothko, and Reinhardt. But it is only a useful comparison in so far as we get to see how completely different is Soulages’ relationship to painting and to the canvas. If, as I and others have argued, Rothko invites us to fall into his canvases of thickly layered paint, Soulages keeps us on the surface. The ribbons of flat against glossy black paint, the composition of different thicknesses, different viscosities, different panels of black moving in different directions across a diptych, even the veil of black paint dragged and scraped away to reveal blue in Peinture 222 x 137, 3 février 1990, keeps me occupied on the surface. In fact, these paintings actively discourage the contemplation that has me fall into my own self before a Rothko canvas, a falling I love and yearn to experience again and again.

All of this said, I need to go back and spend more time with the diptychs in which it appears as though the surface of thin black paint has been stripped away when wet with tape to reveal grey, brown, and white underneath. These huge canvases such as Peinture 222 x 222cm, 8 juin 2001 may represent a return to that vein of modernist love of painting in which the mystery of color is all that matters.

Providence, dir. Alain Resnais, 1977

As I sat watching Resnais 1977 psycho-drama, Providence, I thought of all my students who would not even know his name, and as a result, of what they were missing out on. For those of us raised on the diet and discipline of learning a discipline from the Pyramids to Picasso, from Old Norse to The Sound and the Fury, the equivalent in my cinema studies' education was the Lumières to Film School Generation. And Resnais and Last Year at Marienbad were turning points in 20th century cinema as they were in my growing appetite for modernist film. Yes, it might be confusing, and it might even be nonsense, but for me, seeing this bizarre film as an undergraduate was as all part of the thrill of having new worlds opened up.

And I was plunged back into that excitement last night when I chose Resnais’ 1977 Providence over This is It, the Michael Jackson bonanza. Now my shame: I can't believe I hadn’t seen Providence already. It’s a great film and would, in many ways, be more suitable in the classroom than Resnais’ modernist masterpiece. Students would get their teeth into what’s real and what’s fantasy – and of course, because the lines between the characters’ reality and the fantasies of the aging John Gielgud, and the narrative he is writing in his latest and presumably last novel are indeterminable and unfathomable, we could then turn the lesson to questions of the realities that are at stake in the cinematic world more generally. The absence of reality check in Providence makes it a perfect psychological puzzle of the kind that fulfils both the needs of the students to convince themselves of the importance of untangling the “real” from the imagined, and of the teacher to convince them of the pitfalls of debating the stability of cinematic realities. Students would also have fun with analyzing the character of the son (Dirk Bogarde in a characteristically brilliant performance) who not only harbors all the anger and hangups of his father, but who takes a mistress that is played by the same actor — Elaine Stritch — as his mother.


Aside from its suitability to the classroom, there is much to admire about the film as it demonstrates Renais’ absolute skill at putting stories together in a way that both embraces the full spectrum of the cinema’s want to transgress social norms and expectations and, simultaneously, to escape the rationalizing desires of the audience. Providence plunges us into a world of an aging — dying if we are to believe Gielgud — writer who both rewrites his life as he remembers it or as he would like it to have been, and/or (not sure which) convinces us his nightmares are true. There is reference to a war as the opening depicts soldiers chasing an unknown man through a forest who turns out to be transforming into a werewolf. However, the real war of the film is the narrative written, erased, rethought, and rewritten, as we are shown it to be playing either in the aging John Gielgud’s mind, or in the novel he is or is not writing. What we never know is whether or not he is really vilified by his family, or if it is in his imagination – do they change their minds about him, or does he change his mind about them? Is the daughter-in-law (Ellyn Burstyn) really in pursuit of the man who killed a werewolf? Who turns out to be Gielgud’s illegitimate son? Or are her lascivious desires the whim of a horny old man frustrated with and intolerant of a repressive social world that allows no place for his bald imaginings? It’s difficult to say. And in the end, knowing Renais, it probably doesn’t matter. What matters for him, as the great modernist filmmaker, is that the medium allows him to blur all distinction between real and imagined, fantasy and reality, memory and fiction and even, the nature of the relationships between husband and wife, stranger and step son.

Film doesn’t come much better than this, and, given the choice of seeing Resnais’ version of reality or Michael Jackson raised from the dead – which might not be Michael Jackson after all – there is really no discussion.

Shirin Neshat, Games of Desire, Galerie Jerome de Noirmont

My two cultural outings last Friday were, to say the least, uncomfortable bedfellows. I knew this in advance, but it wasn’t until 1am this morning when I arrived home after a four hour performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar that I realized just how impoverished some forms of contemporary culture can be.

I have never been a fan of Shirin Neshat’s work: she is one of those artists that I think is very overrated, someone who exploits her Iranian background to win the attention of those who matter in the art world. She is, afterall, an upper-middle class, Berkeley educated woman living in New York City who makes images about female oppression in the Islamic world, claiming legitimacy on the basis of her Iranian roots. Why then, do I keep going back to see her work? Because I keep thinking, well maybe there is something to these video installations, typically bifurcated visions of Muslim gender divisions on two screens simultaneously, that I am just not getting. Alas, Games of Desire at Galerie Jerome de Noirmont on Avenue Matignon failed to convince me of any failing on my part to be wise to the supposed profundity of Neshat’s work. The dozen photographs on the ground floor, all of a single Laotian in front of a ritual drawing are pretty, but it is the video upstairs that is the centerpiece of the exhibition. I had barely got through the gallery door before the man told me the video was upstairs.

The 22 minute video was filmed in Luang Prabang in Laos in 2005 and 2008. The two-channel video is shown on two screens, one at either end of the gallery: on the right we see 60-80 year men singing passionate love songs, and on the left, women of the same age do the same. The Laotian men sit on mats cross-legged, chanting and singing with glee as if to schoolgirls, wooing them with phrases that seem strange given the reality of the women opposite them, at the other end of the room. In a group, and then one by one, framed individually, they sing of the “round faced girl” while the women respond by singing of the men’s white teeth and red lips. Clearly, the lined, yet joyful, faces, mouths filled with rotten teeth on the opposite wall do not marry with the young lovers we imagine to be the recipient of such flattery.

The singing or chanting of the men mirrors that of the women. The words are symmetrical and repetitive, slowly becoming raunchy, erotic and then sexually explicit. We are somewhat shocked to hear these old faces singing such lines as “open my skirt so you can see the paradise! There you can see the Naga’s (dragon) eyes in the water (…)” The men answer by matching the invitation “There you can see the God’s mouth in the sky! Something black erected, you thought it was a hunter’s gun powder (…).” The representation of the old Loatians enjoying life and reveling in their erotic fantasies of is anthropologically of interest for its challenge to conventional representations of the old. Similarly, there is a very touching connection established between the men and the women across the boundary created by the gallery space.

Ultimately, however, I remain unconvinced of the great insights about this Eastern culture that Shirin Neshat apparently brings to the West. There is a border between men and women, yes, but wasn't this the same message we were given in all Neshat's other work? I am only glad that I had Julius Ceasar to look forward to, and to give me something more worthy of my energy to think about over the weekend.

Stay tuned!