Pierre Soulages is internationally famous as the most important living French painter of the postwar École de Paris. And yet, Soulages emphatically rejects this association. His voluntary estrangement from the designation that contributes to his renown has not, however, prevented his works from entering international collections under the École de Paris rubric. In 1998, the National Gallery of Victoria acquired a large and magnificent canvas, Painting 202 x 143 cm, 6 November 1967 (Peinture 202 x 143 cm, 6 novembre 1967),1See P. Encrevé, Soulages: L’Oeuvre complet – peintures, vol. II, Paris, 1995, no. 610, p. 176. the inaugural purchase from the Eugénie Crawford Bequest (fig. 1). Meeting Mrs Eugénie Crawford’s stipulation that funds from her estate be held in trust and used to purchase works by artists from or associated with ‘the School of Paris’,2Eugénie Lydia Crawford, will, 15 November 1989, National Gallery of Victoria files. Soulages’s painting belongs to a complex history, the history of the École de Paris and, in particular, of its reconfiguration in the period following World War II.
In 1945 the appellation ‘École de Paris’ was barely two decades old, coined by the critic André Warnod in 1925 to defend l’art vivant: art being produced, chiefly in Paris, by young artists of a noticeably modern tendency, as opposed to academic art.3 A. Warnod, ‘L’École de Paris’, Comoedia, 27 January 1925, p. 1; and his Les Berceaux de la jeune peinture: L’École de Paris, Paris, 1925. See also G. Fabre, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’École de Paris?’, in L’École de Paris 1904–1929: La Part de l’Autre (exh. cat.), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 2000. However, Warnod and other art critics also used the term to describe the multitude of non-French artists living and working in the French capital in preference to their countries of birth – artists such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine, Jules Pascin, František Kupka and Jacques Lipchitz. Though demonstrating disparate stylistic manners, École de Paris artists of the 1920s were, for the most part, carrying on the painterly innovations associated with modernist art: a loose and obvious brushstroke not necessarily bounded by a contouring line, disruption of the conventions of linear perspective, the non-naturalistic application of colour, the défiguration of the human figure, and the overall conception of painting as a subjective expression of self. Throughout the 1930s, the term École de Paris continued to signify the numerous clusters of young, foreign-born artists who were living a poor and bohemian lifestyle in Paris, defying academic tradition and seeking new forms of expression in their art.
The temperate modernism of the École de Paris was viewed by conservative cultural commentators as an invasive and damaging virus infecting the purity, clarity and realism of French art. A loud coterie of critics contrasted the contaminating presence of the École de Paris with the ‘authenticity’ of the native-born artists described as the ‘École Française’. Had the ‘barbarian horde’ of artists so recently arrived in Paris from ‘somewhere else’ ever seen a Poussin or a Corot and understood ‘the intrinsic lucidity, tact and gentleness of true French culture’?4L. Vauxcelles, Le Carnet de la semaine (1925), cited in R. Golan, ‘The École Française vs. the École de Paris: The Debate about the Status of Jewish Artists in Paris between the Wars’, in The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1914, eds K. Silver & R. Golan, New York, 1985, p. 83. The cosmopolitan and internationalist École de Paris was construed as evidence for the decline and decadence of French culture, caused by the insidious penetration of ‘foreign’ and ‘Jewish’ elements into the French art world. When France capitulated to Germany in June 1940, and the Vichy regime erected an exclusionary, racist and dictatorial nation state in thraldom to Nazi Germany, the art world was equally subject to stricture. As a ‘matter of hygiene’, the Beaux-Arts, the official body charged with arts administration in France, purged from gallery walls the ‘parasitical’ and ‘deformed’ paintings of the École de Paris.5G. Hilaire, ‘La Fausse Liberté’ (undated typescript), cited in L. Bertrand Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite 1940-1944, Paris, 1993, p. 62. Georges Hilaire became Secrétaire Général in the Ministry for the Interior in April 1942 and Secrétaire Général des Beaux-Arts in March 1944. By 1942, the interwar École de Paris was effectively dead.
It comes as a surprise, then, to see the influential art historian Pierre Francastel exclaim with joy in early 1946:
At this very moment we are witnessing a complete change in the scene, and there is no doubt that a new artistic epoch has begun … I salute the first stirrings of the new École de Paris!6 P. Francastel, Nouvelle peinture, nouveau dessin: L’École de Paris, Paris, 1946, p. 179.
Francastel’s book Nouvelle peinture, nouveau dessin: L’École de Paris was one of many publications, exhibitions and press notices that announced to the public that French artists and art had not only survived the Nazi Occupation but had emerged from the years of suppression more powerful and creative than before. But the new (nouvelle) École de Paris bears little resemblance to its pre-war antecedent, whether in membership, artistic style, or goals.
During the late 1940s, the designation École de Paris referred primarily to a group of French painters who had exhibited during the Occupation under a banner that masked their progressive inclinations: ‘Jeunes Peintres de Tradition Française’ (Young Painters of the French Tradition). The group was dominated by Jean Bazaine, Alfred Manessier, Maurice Estève, Charles Lapicque, Gustave Singier and Jean Le Moal. Deriving their inspiration from the observable, or exterior, world, the works of these painters may be distinguished from the completely abstract paintings and reliefs of artists such as Alberto Magnelli. Each of the Jeunes Peintres sought to synthesize, in a unique way, bright fauvist colour and the innovations of cubist form and space. In comparison with the rough, thick pâte and brut surface of works by contemporaries such as Jean Fautrier, painters like Manessier and Estève maintained the smooth finish associated with the French beau métier tradition (fig. 2). The Jeunes Peintres were greeted at the Liberation as the harbingers of the rebirth of France, the legitimate heirs to artists such as Picasso and Matisse.
However, the narrowly Francophile definition of the renascent École de Paris was rapidly expanded to celebrate the heroism of Picasso himself, who had remained in occupied Paris during the war; to welcome the numerous foreign and French artists returning from exile; and to include the flood of newcomers to the Paris art scene. The fact that many of the artists of the Nouvelle École de Paris – among them Hans Hartung, Jean-Michel Allan, César Domela, Marie-Hélène Vieira da Silva and Gérard Schneider – were both foreign-born and painting in styles that rejected the mimetic representation of the so-called objective world did not go unnoticed. The art historian and essayist René Huyghe observed in 1945 that: ‘The École Française is becoming the École de Paris: the cosmopolitanism of the metropolis is again creating that sense of uprootedness … favourable to abstract art’.7 R. Huyghe, ‘La Querelle de l’art figuratif’, Art et style, no. 2, June 1945, unpaginated.
The prevailing atmosphere of ignorance and hostility towards abstract art in postwar Paris did not prevent both the Jeunes Peintres and their foreign colleagues from dominating exhibitions of contemporary French art at home and abroad. When Soulages moved to Paris in 1947, he soon found himself at home in an international community of artists committed to the practice of abstraction.
Pierre Soulages was born in Rodez, France, in 1919, and had begun to paint while a teenager. During the war he frequented the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier – though not as a formally enrolled student – and worked as a farmhand. Although in the pre-war years he had been largely ignorant of developments in abstract art, a meeting with Sonia Delaunay gave him an introduction and he created his first abstract works in 1946. By 1947, the renaissance in French art symbolized by the Nouvelle École de Paris was already beginning to dissipate in the morass of Cold War political wrangling, together with heated debates among artists and art critics as to the merits of realism versus those of abstraction. The abstractionists were themselves mired in divisive discussion that saw the lyrically inclined artists pitted against those who favoured a geometric approach to abstraction, but the collective goal was never in doubt: to create a mode of painting free from reference to the exterior world. From the other ‘camp’, painters dedicated to realism regarded the abstracts with deep suspicion, suspecting them of a coldly anti-humanist divorce from the necessary attachments to the world. Between 1947 and 1953 – a period, leading up to the death of Stalin, when aesthetics were directly aligned with political ideology – the Paris art world was riven by the figurative–abstract divide, and the École de Paris was called upon to declare its loyalties.
The rapid rise to fame of Soulages’s painting in the early 1950s is inextricable not only from the phoenix-like rebirth of the École de Paris but also from its redefinition as a ‘school’ of abstract painters. From his first one-man exhibition at Galerie Lydia Conti in 1949, Soulages was described by art critics as ‘the strongest and surest’ of the new generation of painters.8See, for example, M. Ragon, ‘Les Expositions’, Paru, July 1949, p. 150. His work was defined by long, broad strokes of the brush, in black or dark brown, creating schematic, carved ‘signs’ on a white ground (fig. 3). These powerful canvases are devoid of any reference to nature, relying on their rhythmic partition of the surface, and on the relationship between forms and the textures of the paint, to create what some critics described as ‘melodies’ or ‘symphonies’ of space. Charles Estienne, a well-known art critic and promoter of abstraction, wrote that Soulages’s works contributed to abstract painting
a simple, virile, and almost rough drawing style, with dark, warm harmonies; an innate feeling for the substance of the paint [pâte] and for the possibilities specific to oil painting; and, most importantly perhaps, a tone that is at once both human and concrete.9 C. Estienne, ‘Peinture et vernissages’, Combat, 25 May 1949, p. 4.
In 1952, Estienne featured Soulages in a series of Nouvelle École de Paris exhibitions, marking the long-awaited triumph of lyrical abstraction in the contemporary art scene.10 See G. Mathieu, De la révolte à la renaissance, Paris, 1963; G. Bonnefoi, Les Années fertiles, 1940–1960, Paris, 1988.
However, Soulages himself has never accepted the location of his work under the École de Paris rubric: ‘As for the French tradition and the École de Paris, these are hollow notions that I have always reacted against’.11Pierre Soulages, quoted in B. Ceysson, Pierre Soulages (exh. cat.), Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, Saint-Étienne, 1976, p. 23. As the artist made explicit in a recent interview, the term École de Paris has only one acceptable meaning for him: as a signifier of the community of foreign artists working in Paris and exhibiting alongside their French colleagues during the interwar years. The advent of the so-called Nouvelle École de Paris at the Liberation is seen by Soulages to be a superficial phenomenon associated with the Jeunes Peintres, whose practice was widely referred to as ‘non-figurative’ painting, to distinguish it from abstract painting in its pure form. For Soulages, an artist dedicated to creating abstract art free from any reference to the exterior world, the timid non-figurative art of Bazaine and his colleagues continued to be unduly attached to nature, the figure, or objects, no matter how ‘abstract’ an individual work seemed to be. The Nouvelle École de Paris thus signifies for Soulages both the kind of aesthetic compromise that he has never been prepared to make, and an affinity with the French tradition of realism, which is alien to his artistic practice.12 Pierre Soulages, interview by the author, Paris, 8 October 2001.
Yet Soulages kept a deliberate distance from the political and aesthetic quibblings of the late 1940s, a stance that correlates with his earlier refusal to undertake formal Beaux-Arts training, and his antagonism to any kind of official teaching or support. Equally, he has always refused to entertain the suggestion that his work stands as a witness to his epoch, emphasising the liberty of the artist, which was a typical concern for the postwar existentialist generation.
Soulages has frequently railed against what he sees as arbitrary categories, labels that create a falsely monolithic vision of a national art – his conception of the painter as private individual is the dialectical opposite of a perception of the artist as representative of a nation’s cultural heritage. After the trauma of war and the Occupation, and the diminution of France’s economic and political power, cultural production became the vital foundation for the reconstruction of French national identity. This meant that art was required to function not so much as a proxy for political power, but as the very core of the nation’s soul – to embody a timeless ‘Frenchness’, which could bolster the collective ego at home and convince international spectators that France was still a power to be reckoned with. In 1949, Soulages’s work was featured on the poster for the first show of French abstract art in Germany since the end of Nazism. This exhibition, Grosse Ausstellung französischer abstrakter Malerei, toured Germany’s larger cities in 1949.13For the exhibition, and for a letter in which Soulages discusses his painting principles, see M.-A. Kaufmann, ‘Les Échanges artistiques franco-allemands en 1948–1949’, Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, no. 75, Spring 2001, pp. 99–111. It included works by Soulages, Herbin, Bott, Del Marie, Domela, Kupka, Schneider and Hartung, and was the beginning of a vast campaign of international exposure during the 1950s, where Soulages emblematised the freedom of expression touted as the hallmark of École de Paris painting. In 1953 Soulages contributed two paintings to the panorama titled French Painting Today,14See Y. Sjöberg, in French Painting Today: Peintres vivants de l’École de Paris (exh. cat.), National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1953, cat. nos 98, 99. which toured Australian museums and was an auspicious beginning to his renown in this country: the collecting of his works by Australian museums began some four years later (fig. 4).15 The National Gallery of Victoria acquired an aquatint by Soulages in 1957, and Composition No. 3 and a relief etching in 1959. The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, holds Painting 195 x 130 cm, 6 August 1956 and Painting 222 x 175 cm, 23 July 1979 (see Encrevé, vol. I, no. 239, p. 243, repr.; vol. III, no. 791, p. 79, repr.; M. Lloyd & M. Desmond, European and American Paintings and Sculptures, 1870–1970, in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1992, pp. 286–9, reprs). In 1964, jointly with Hans Arp, Soulages carried off the prestigious Carnegie Prize, which was celebrated back home as the triumph of French independence and love of liberty over the market-driven machinations of the US.16See P. Cabanne, ‘Les U.S.A. votent pour l’École de Paris’, ‘Soulages et Arp prix Carnegie 1964: Revanche de l’École de Paris’, Arts, 11–17 November 1964, p. 1.
Despite the much-bruited antagonism between France and the US, from 1949 onward Soulages’s work was well received in New York and he joined the Sam Kootz Gallery in 1954. In 1957 Soulages made his first visit to America, finally meeting many of the painters with whom he is often compared: Frankenthaler, Hofmann, de Kooning, Motherwell, Reinhardt, Rothko, Tobey, and later Barnett Newman. On the putative competition between the so-called School of New York and the École de Paris, Soulages has expressed nothing but scorn: ‘I mistrust people who put the emphasis on their identity, because I find this a sign of fragility. When one emphasises identity it’s because one is afraid of not having one’.17 Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 32.
While rejecting what he calls a sociological interpretation of his art, Soulages has been much more eloquent in describing his working practices and his philosophy of painting. A provincial upbringing had left him with memories of roughly engraved menhirs and monumental, ascetic Romanesque architecture. In his Montparnasse atelier in 1947, he began to seek in his painting a similarly architectural expression of stilled time and of the exploration of space through rhythmic structure:
It was in 1947 that I began to group my brush marks, which had always been large (these lines having been coloured surfaces from the start), 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 immobilised 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.
By around 1955, the sign tends to disappear and these brushstrokes come together and multiply; from their repetition, from the relationships then established between these almost similar forms, is born a rhythm, a rhythm of space.18Soulages, quoted in J. Grenier, Entretiens avec dix-sept peintres non-figuratifs (1963), Paris, 1990, pp. 126–7.
In interviews, Soulages is always stressing his objective: that his painting be understood as entirely self-contained and non-referential. The goal is not to depict a fictional nude or a landscape, nor to evoke space through the traditional method of depth and perspective, but to express space directly ‘through this series of relations between things, which I call space’.19Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 5. To achieve this goal, the painter marks out, within the limitations imposed by the dimensions of the canvas, a defining structure of thick black lines, demarcating a pale ground. With the deliberateness of his approach, Soulages does not think of himself as a ‘gestural’ painter: ‘What interests me is the trace of the gesture on the canvas. The gesture itself means little to me’.20Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 11. On the canvas, the gesture becomes a contour, a length, a smoothness, a roughness, and it positions itself in relation to the other brushstrokes and to the nude ground: an ‘ensemble of relationships’.21ibid., p. 12. According to the artist, this complex of relationships is further extended beyond the canvas, to the painter himself, and to the viewer, in an intimate triangle.22 Soulages, interview.
In the Melbourne painting, the verticality of the canvas is held tautly in place by the two horizontal struts of black, like two roofing beams. Breaking with an earlier attention to diagonals and straight lines, the two beams contain between them three fat black ovals, their liquidness sploshing beyond their horizontal confines. By its very nature the canvas is a ‘determined surface’ and yet in no way do its physical dimensions delimit the space that Soulages has created through the relationships of his forms, and, in this particular case, between colours.
The question of colour plagues Soulages. Addicted to the brutal simplicity of black and white since his childhood, he has exclaimed: ‘But, black is a colour! A colour! An extremely violent colour! … Black, for me, is a very intense colour, more intense than yellow, and it brings with it reactions, violent relationships’.23Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 6. Nonetheless, the artist has gone through several phases of intense experimentation with the addition of other colours to his black and white. The Melbourne painting belongs to a sequence of works made between 1967 and 1973 in which Soulages adds blue (other paintings use red), in a subtle game of opacity and transparency against the light-blocking black. In the National Gallery of Victoria’s picture, the blue washes downward from the top to the bottom of the canvas, decreasing in intensity from a dirty blackblue to a semi-transparent and watery veil, smudged and running at the borders. Using just one extra colour to create a stark contrast against the white ground, Soulages refuses to commit himself to painting colour harmonies, Even so, he has admitted that the colour adds a certain emotional tenor: ‘Yes! But this calm and rather soft blue is worth as much for its colour as for what it contributes in terms of the lighting of the black and white nearby!’.24 Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 27. Without in the least imposing an expressive reading of the canvas, Soulages inducts the viewer into a journey where
it is necessary to consider, above all … the dimensions of the line, the breadth, the thickness, the medium, its transparency, its opacity, its placement within the canvas, its situation in relation to the other lines or painted marks.25Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 18; see also R. Vailland, ‘Comment travaille Pierre Soulages’, L’Oeil, no. 77, May 1961, pp. 40–7.
The relationship between Soulages and his involuntary membership of the École de Paris remains tense. In an interview dedicated to the subject, the artist exclaimed: ‘The truth is that the first people to take an interest in me – it was in their heads: how they thought of the École de Paris. I had nothing to do with it!’.26Soulages, quoted in L. Vialatte de Pemille, L’École de Paris devant la presse, août 1944 – mai 1947, PhD thesis, Université de Paris I, 1982, p. 301. Notwithstanding Soulages’s protests, the history of his work, its collection, exhibiting and critical reception, are indelibly associated with the postwar artistic community we call the School of Paris. The bequest of Eugénie Lydia Crawford (1914–1995) to the National Gallery of Victoria acknowledges Soulages’s central role in the rise to prominence of this community.
A founding member of the Voluntary Guides of the National Gallery of Victoria, and the descendant of a Normandy family that settled in Sydney in the 1840s, Mrs Crawford was a cultural Francophile, who during her lifetime travelled widely in Europe and had a great personal interest in contemporary French art.27See C. Reddin, ‘Obituaries: Connoisseur Shared Her Cultural Passion’, Australian, 31 July 1995. Her will directed the Trustees of her estate to use the income from it ‘to acquire [for the Melbourne collection] paintings by artists of the School of Paris 1920–1970 and those European artists who were directly related to it or influenced by it’.28 Crawford, will.
These stipulations present broad parameters, encompassing the so-called first generation of École de Paris painters, of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the Nouvelle École de Paris. However, Mrs Crawford further elaborated her intentions for the bequest in a way that reveals her own taste for the modern abstract style of the 1950s: ‘[I]t is my wish that works by the following artists be acquired and works of those artists who in turn are clearly related or sympathetic to them namely:– MANNESSIER [sic] [,] MAGNELLI[,] SINGIER[,] BISSIERE[,] SOULAGES[,] KUPKA[,] FAUTRIER’.29 Crawford, will. Interestingly, it is highly probable that Mrs Crawford, given her longstanding association with the National Gallery of Victoria, would have seen Painting 202 x 143 cm, 6 November 1967 when it visited Melbourne as part of the 1969 exhibition Three Trends in Contemporary French Art.30See Three Trends in Contemporary French Art / Trois tendances de l’art français contemporain (exh. cat.), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1969, p. [2], cat. no. 50.
Whether or not Eugénie Crawford knew the picture, however, it is thanks to her personal passion for the French avant-garde that the National Gallery of Victoria now has in its collection a work by one of the best talents – though most reluctant members – of the École de Paris.
Natalie Adamson, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archaeology, The University of Melbourne (in 2001).
Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author.
1 See P. Encrevé, Soulages: L’Oeuvre complet – peintures, vol. II, Paris, 1995, no. 610, p. 176.
2 Eugénie Lydia Crawford, will, 15 November 1989, National Gallery of Victoria files.
3 A. Warnod, ‘L’École de Paris’, Comoedia, 27 January 1925, p. 1; and his Les Berceaux de la jeune peinture: L’École de Paris, Paris, 1925. See also G. Fabre, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’École de Paris?’, in L’École de Paris 1904–1929: La Part de l’Autre (exh. cat.), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 2000.
4 L. Vauxcelles, Le Carnet de la semaine (1925), cited in R. Golan, ‘The École Française vs. the École de Paris: The Debate about the Status of Jewish Artists in Paris between the Wars’, in The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1914, eds K. Silver & R. Golan, New York, 1985, p. 83.
5 G. Hilaire, ‘La Fausse Liberté’ (undated typescript), cited in L. Bertrand Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite 1940-1944, Paris, 1993, p. 62. Georges Hilaire became Secrétaire Général in the Ministry for the Interior in April 1942 and Secrétaire Général des Beaux-Arts in March 1944.
6 P. Francastel, Nouvelle peinture, nouveau dessin: L’École de Paris, Paris, 1946, p. 179.
7 R. Huyghe, ‘La Querelle de l’art figuratif’, Art et style, no. 2, June 1945, unpaginated.
8 See, for example, M. Ragon, ‘Les Expositions’, Paru, July 1949, p. 150.
9 C. Estienne, ‘Peinture et vernissages’, Combat, 25 May 1949, p. 4.
10 See G. Mathieu, De la révolte à la renaissance, Paris, 1963; G. Bonnefoi, Les Années fertiles, 1940–1960, Paris, 1988.
11 Pierre Soulages, quoted in B. Ceysson, Pierre Soulages (exh. cat.), Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, Saint-Étienne, 1976, p. 23.
12 Pierre Soulages, interview by the author, Paris, 8 October 2001.
13 For the exhibition, and for a letter in which Soulages discusses his painting principles, see M.-A. Kaufmann, ‘Les Échanges artistiques franco-allemands en 1948–1949’, Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, no. 75, Spring 2001, pp. 99–111.
14 See Y. Sjöberg, in French Painting Today: Peintres vivants de l’École de Paris (exh. cat.), National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1953, cat. nos 98, 99.
15 The National Gallery of Victoria acquired an aquatint by Soulages in 1957, and Composition No. 3 and a relief etching in 1959. The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, holds Painting 195 x 130 cm, 6 August 1956 and Painting 222 x 175 cm, 23 July 1979 (see Encrevé, vol. I, no. 239, p. 243, repr.; vol. III, no. 791, p. 79, repr.; M. Lloyd & M. Desmond, European and American Paintings and Sculptures, 1870–1970, in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1992, pp. 286–9, reprs).
16 See P. Cabanne, ‘Les U.S.A. votent pour l’École de Paris’, ‘Soulages et Arp prix Carnegie 1964: Revanche de l’École de Paris’, Arts, 11–17 November 1964, p. 1.
17 Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 32.
18 Soulages, quoted in J. Grenier, Entretiens avec dix-sept peintres non-figuratifs (1963), Paris, 1990, pp. 126–7.
19 Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 5.
20 Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 11.
21 ibid., p. 12.
22 Soulages, interview.
23 Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 6.
24 Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 27.
25 Soulages, quoted in Ceysson, p. 18; see also R. Vailland, ‘Comment travaille Pierre Soulages’, L’Oeil, no. 77, May 1961, pp. 40–7.
26 Soulages, quoted in L. Vialatte de Pemille, L’École de Paris devant la presse, août 1944 – mai 1947, PhD thesis, Université de Paris I, 1982, p. 301.
27 See C. Reddin, ‘Obituaries: Connoisseur Shared Her Cultural Passion’, Australian, 31 July 1995.
28 Crawford, will.
29 Crawford, will.
30 See Three Trends in Contemporary French Art / Trois tendances de l’art français contemporain (exh. cat.), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1969, p. [2], cat. no. 50.