“I WORKED USING PRINTING BECAUSE, WITH A PRINT SOMETHING APPEARS WHICH CANNOT APPEAR WITH PAINTING”
The painter Pierre Soulages’ body of work is vast, and today his fame is universal. His paintings have marked, through successive periods, the course of artistic creation from the beginning of the second half of the XXth century up to today. In addition to this continuous presence there is also a t
The painter Pierre Soulages’ body of work is vast, and today his fame is universal. His paintings have marked, through successive periods, the course of artistic creation from the beginning of the second half of the XXth century up to today. In addition to this continuous presence there is also a truly singular work - his crowning achievement - the commission for the stained glass windows of the Romanesque Abbey of Conques, inaugurated in 1994, which breathed new life into contemporary stained glass art.
Pierre Soulages (Born 1919)
Eau-forte XXII, 1973
In a separate vein, Pierre Soulages was not indifferent to the possibilities offered by printing. This interest seems surprising, even a paradox, given his painted works - direct, controlled and immediate, as opposed to the technicalities which printing requires as well as the double manipulation involved in producing an image on a support medium before transferring it to a sheet of paper. Each of Pierre Soulages’ paintings is unique, whereas the very essence of printing is its reproducibility.
It must be said that his paintings, whatever format they may be, are monumental; they have a physical presence, they are imposing and fill a wall, whereas a print is something intimate, a thing to be appreciated discretely, individually, to be physically handled; at other times being stored away, as depicted so well by Honoré Daumier in his painting The Print Lover. Nonetheless, from 1952 onwards, working at the Lacourière Workshops in Paris, he applied himself to this art form and the different ways to go about it - etching, lithography and even screen-printing. He quickly learnt how to achieve his aims, notably from 1957 onwards using a totally new technique of etching, enabling him to produce results without equal.
The artist’s interest in printing then was not as an adjunct or an accompaniment to his painting, but as an art form in itself; offering him a new and different form of artistic self-expression. His output remained, however, rather limited - 45 etchings, 49 lithographs and 26 screen-prints in total between 1952 and 2008. This is indeed small when compared to, say, the 395 pieces produced by Zao Wou-Ki or the 605 of Hans Harfung. In another field of abstract art Aurélie Nemours, who also turned to printing early on, produced 257 pieces.
Despite the low number of pieces produced, the originality of his production techniques and the quality of the finished results - some of the best of which will be offered by Artcurial - leave no doubt that the printed works are an integral yet independent element of the artist’s body of work.
Serge Lemoine
Informations
Viewing: 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th December 2017
Auction: Wednesday 13th December 2017 at 7:00 pm
News Contact
Carine Decroi
cdecroi@artcurial.com