Hidden Treasures

In the depths of the Louvre, besides the great masterworks of Medieval and Renaissance Italian artists, I came upon a modern gem. The piece’s contrasting tones are stark and reminiscent of Malevich’s Black Square (1915) dressed up for Halloween, and the work clashes terrible with the beige walls on which it has been implanted. Regardless, the very fact that this ultra contemporary delight has been thrown into the mix of Madonnas and child, robed men, and mythical scenarios, all adorned in ostentatious gold frames, (ha, maybe they’re actually the ones on their way to the Halloween party,) makes the work standout. Perhaps in the same way the less than mediocre babaganoush I had when I first arrived in Paris was one of he best things I’ve tasted in the past 2.5 months, given every other morsel I’ve put in my mouth has been Italian.The work is by Pierre Soulages, who is supposedly having a retrospective at the Pompidou, which I somehow could not find when I was there, and is called Peinture (2000).

Soulages chose to place this work in the Louvre's Salon Carre because, as he says, the Salon Carre “brings together paintings that represent a significant point in the development of Western painting…” In particular, he situated his piece beside a work he admires, Paolo Uccello’s La Bataille de San Romano (1438), because La Bataille de San Romano refers to an outside narrative, whereas Peinture is about the relationship between the spectator and the painting, and thus the two works are entirely different and there’s no competition between them.

Despite the fact that Soulages claims that the works are entirely different, I can’t help but see a number of connections. Firstly, darkness is a key feature of both works. While sitting in the Louvre, I made a friend named Mathildes who studied Soulages work for her PhD dissertation; she told me that Soulages rarely uses color in his work, because he is interested in the way the light of a space interacts with the darkness of his canvas. Likewise, La Bastalle de San Romano has a dark tone. Unfortunately I cannot seem to find any information on whether this is in fact a night scene, however the work depicts a battle between Florence and Siena that occurred in the 1400’s. In both cases, the darkness of the backgrounds is emphasized by the presence of pigments with reflective qualities: gold in Uccello’s work, and white in Soulages’.

The second connection may well be a conspiracy theory born from my unruly mind as it sat before the two works for nearly two hours, or perhaps the influence of too much ARTnews with all of their forensic cases... However, many modern artists abstract familiar forms by reducing them to their most essential features, and call me crazy, but the more I look at Soulages' work the more I see an abstracted version of the very same scene, or perhaps the very next scene, depicted by Uccello. Perhaps Soulages represents Uccello’s knights / soldiers with all of their accoutrements for war through his messy white lines, after all life, and certainly war, are undoubtedly messy. In other words, maybe Uccello’s perfectly clear warriors are headed into the dark, chaos of war represented in Soulages' abstract work. In fact, the flagpoles in Uccello’s work and the horizontal lines of Soulages’ even flow seamlessly into one another, creating a bridge between the two.

Coincidental? Maybe… Interesting nonetheless? I hope…

More to come on my Parisian art escapades soon!

1. Kazamir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, Oil on Canvas. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

2. Pierre Soulages, Peinture, 2000. Musee du Louvre, Paris.

3. Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano, c. 1455, wood panel. Musee du Louvre, Paris.

4. Photograph of Soulages’ and Uccello’s works beside each other in the Salon Carre.