Pierre Soulages (French, born 1919)Peinture 128,5 x 128,5 cm, 16 décembre 1959 1959 signed; signed on the reverseoil on canvas 129 by 130 cm.50 13/16 by 51 3/16 in. This work was executed in 1959. Footnotes:Provenance Gimpel Fils Gallery, LondonGalerie Artcurial, ParisGalerie Jan Krugier, Geneva (JK 3903)Private Collection, SwitzerlandGalerie Kazautzis, ParisComte Paul de Senneville Collection, Paris (acquired from the above in 1988)Sale: Briest Scp., Paris, Art Abstrait et Contemporain, 23 November 1994, Lot 32Private Collection, EuropeSale: Christie's, London, Twentieth Century Art, 9 December 1998, Lot 715Private Collection, EuropeAcquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 1999 Exhibited London, Gimpel Fils Gallery, Collectors Choice X, 1961, p. 14, no. 29, illustrated in colourParis, Galerie Artcurial, Méditerranée: Sources et Formes du XXème Siècle, 1988L'Isle sur la Sorgue, Association Campredon Art & Culture, Un Parcours d'Art Contemporain, 1993, p. 65, illustrated in colour (incorrectly titled) Literature Pierre Encrevé, L'œuvre complet, Peintures II. 1959-1978, Paris 1995, p. 54, no. 402, illustrated in colour Sublime, melodic, and captivatingly beautiful, Pierre Soulages' Peinture 128,5 x 128,5cm, 16 décembre 1959 is a masterpiece from the artist's most instrumental and accomplished period of production. At the height of his powers at the turn of the decade in 1959, Soulages had achieved an irreproducible virtuosity in the choreography of his raclage technique that reaches its climax in the present work. Through gestures wrought in a rich, lustrous surface of tar-like black over vivid, claret red, Peinture 128,5 x 128,5cm, 16 décembre 1959 boasts a harmonious tension suspended between the underpainted margins of the squared canvas. Struck from corner-to-corner, the abrupt palette and singular impact of the painting is undeniable, filling the space of the work with a comprehensive dynamism and energy that is strikingly unique for paintings of this period. Often composing his works over blue, white, ochre or deep umber, the blood red surface onto which Soulages has sculpted the incandescent black pigment infuses a carnal power that, like the work of his friend Mark Rothko, impresses upon the subconscious mind a timeless and primitive air. An undivided composition whose resounding force is governed by the uniformity of its square architecture, Peinture 128,5 x 128,5cm, 16 décembre 1959 stands as one of the most emphatic affirmations of Soulages' eminence as one of the greatest painters of the Modern period, with few having composed such a timeless, consistent and exceptionally distinguished body of work. Captured in this painting is the purest invocation of Soulages' creative pursuance, rendering the instinctive, human compulsion towards image making and spaces of darkness. A tour de force from a very limited number of red canvases Soulages produced almost solely between 1958 and 1961, made rarer still by it's large, square format – one of only two produced in this combination, and the only painting remaining in private hands – the present work is an outstanding, museum-quality example of Soualges' magnanimous style. Honing a rare, univocal voice, Soulages' quintessential use of black goes beyond representative illusionism or abstract formalism; renouncing the flatness and medium-specific terms that were being pioneered by Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s in New York. Instead he remained utterly committed to his poetic vision of painting, resolutely standing outside of the academic niches of Modern painting. 'When I see a group of artists who have something in common, I am not interested, For what they have in common is shared,' Soulages asserted, 'when one speaks of a 'movement' what interests me is what breaks with it – what goes beyond it' (the artist in: James Johnson Sweeney, Soulages, London 1972, p. 28). Comparing him with other outliers and artistic innovators of the post-war years, Soulages finds kinship with the likes of Mark Rothko, Kazuo Shiraga, and Zao Wou-Ki – with whom he shared an enduring artistic bond and rapport. Artists for whom the formulaic and plastic pressures of Western Modernism were exhausted, returning to a deeply transcendent, experiential, and culturally enriched notion of what painting could be. Soulages was born in Rodez in Southern France on the 24th December 1919. A region with a long history of settlers and cultures, he was captivated by the art of Neolithic man and the relics of the pre-Roman, Celtic settlement upon which Rodez was built, drawing formative inspiration from the menhirs and dolmens – carved stone monoliths and tombs – that he saw in the Musée Fenaille as a young boy. Symbols, signs, and totemic motifs, Soulages has held fast to the notion of painting as an instantaneous revelation: 'in this way, narrative time – that of the line followed by the eye – was suppressed. The duration of the line having disappeared, time was immobilized in a hieratic sign' (the artist in: John Doherty, trans., Pierre Soulages, Lyon 2017, p.16). Seizing the timeliness and physicality of his gestures, from his earliest works Soulages developed a signature method, striating and smoothing the viscous black oil paint with spatulas fabricated by the artist himself, generating a sonorous cascade of flats and ridges that catch and refract light precisely along the diagonal scores. Producing a harmony of angles and chords of cast light that he synthesised into a unified form, the effect is mesmerising, and in none so more refined or thrilling than Peinture 128,5 x 128,5cm, 16 décembre 1959. Soulages' paintings of the early 1950s exhibit a linearity that is the most shorthand form of his painterly sign, constructing compositions from a sequence of abrupt vertical and horizontal strikes over a washed ground. It is at the end of the decade when Soulages begins to break with this formal rigidity and develops a method of improvisational mark making that culminates in the undeniable peak of his career. From 1955 onwards, the hieratic signage gives way to a multiplication of brushstrokes and scrapes, introducing a rhythm and poetry to his style that generates a harmonic balance of form and colour. Between 1958 and 1961, Soulages' canvases reach the height of their richness and versatility, combing black paint energetically over understated pigments with a novel approach to the space of the painting; he fills the canvas, working wet-on-wet with a much more dynamic, gestural vocabulary sweeping corner-to-corner, creating an elaborate ensemble of relationships compressed into a single frame. At times dividing the composition, working in upper and lower registers of the canvas, or pushing the density of impressions into a slender quadrant and revealing a broad, monochrome wash, Peinture 128,5 x 128,5cm, 16 décembre 1959 instead expresses a compelling, holistic lyricism – condensing a world of emotion and ingenuity into a timeless instant. It was during the war, in 1942, that Soulages had made the acquaintance of the novelist and poet Joseph Delteil, who in turn had introduced him to abstract painter Sonia Delaunay. Restlessly pursuing his own style at this time, Soulages had taken to poetry, seeking a fresh approach to the affective mediums of his art. Enamored of the instantaneity of the poetic image, he read incessantly, from the likes of François Villon, to Charles Baudelaire, and René Char. Whilst American curator and writer James Johnson Sweeney famously compared Soulages' paintings to the melodies of a piano – 'like a chord on a vast piano struck with both hands simultaneously – struc... This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: AR AR Goods subject to Artists Resale Right Additional Premium. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com