negatively sublime 
identity:
pierre soulages's 
abstract paintings


by Donald Kuspit



Using the term `abstract' in its 

loosest sense for a moment, we can say that 

abstractness in art signals a 

withdrawal from the objective world at a 

time when nothing remains of that world save 

its caput mortuum. Modern art is as 

abstract as the real relations among men. Such 

notions as realism and symbolism have been

completely invalidated.

 
- T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
 1


The question is: how to be 

isolated without having to be insulated?

- D. W. Winnicott, "Communicating and 

Not Communicating Leading to a Study of 

Certain Opposites"
 2 



Dialectics is the consistent sense 

of nonidentity.

- T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
 3



 
1

There is no art that is more subject to 

humiliation--neutralization, objectifi-

cation, conventionalization--than 

abstract painting: "the non-

representational is perfectly compatible 

with the ideas affluent members of society 

have about decorating their walls."4  

Through its reduction to decoration--

"wallpaper patterns capable of being 

extended infinitely"5 --it is brought into

the collective, which is to take revenge on 

it for the fact that it has a certain 

"power of resistance" to the world, because 

it cannot be objectified in its terms 

(unlike realism and symbolism).6 Moreover,

"radically abstract painting" is "lonely 

and exposed," which makes it a critique of 

the objective world, for it reminds it of 

the subjective reality it repudiates--the 

subjective reality lurking within its 

objectivity 7 : this is another reason

radically abstract painting must be 

neutralized, degraded, trivialized, almost 

annihilated. Adorno has argued that we live 

"in an age of total neutralization of 

art,"8 an overstatement which nonetheless 

makes it clear that the "compact 

majorities" of modernity, as he calls them, 

must defend themselves against the 

emotional recognition radical art brings 

with it, even as they endorse and objectify 

it as commodified civilization. For art at 

its most radical is full of too many 

unwelcome, dark truths about modernity and 

its effect on the self--too much 

contradictory enlightenment.


From the start of his career, with a kind 

of heroic tenacity and singlemindedness, 

Soulages has struggled to maintain abstract 

painting's power of resistance--its 

"critical bite."9 Indeed, the critical bite

 of his blackness--initially eschatological 

in import, and then, in his later works, a 

luminous Gnostic revelation in itself--not 

only subverts the decorative, but restores 

a sense of the subjective rebellion which 

abstract painting at its most radical is. 

Soulages uses blackness, aroused and 

dramatized, and finally transparent and 

infused with light, to finesse uniformity 

dialectically--to defeat the wallpaper 

effect of redundant flatness, emotional as 

well as literal, that is the instrument of 

neutralization, de-radicalization, in the very 

act of acknowledging it. But it is above 

all the tenacious isolation of his 

blackness that re-radicalizes the abstract 

painting: loneliness has become blatant and 

intransigent--overexposed and assaultive, 

violent and stubborn--in Soulages's 

blackness, making it utterly incompatible 

with the sociality represented by the 

decorative. It has the force of 

irreconcilability: the transcendence of 

negation.10  


The abstract painting must contradict, even 

seem to abandon the wall: to float free of 

it, or to stand out from it, as though 

levitating at a deliberate distance from 

it, and thus become untouchable, and beyond 

simple placement, social or esthetic--

beyond embeddedness in any decorative scheme. 

The wall, in losing necessity, makes the 

abstract painting seem self-grounding--an 

autonomous if insecure architecture. Thus 

the radically abstract painting reacts to 

the wall's dull stability and clear 

identity with the ironic instability of its 

own identity. Such irreverent detachment is 

one of the things Soulages's blackness 

accomplishes: it is an ecstatic presence--a 

levitating force that slowly ferments a 

negative freedom, once again giving the 

abstract painting a negative identity, thus 

renewing its radicality, its lonely 

exposure. 
 
 
2

"Abstract pictures" may no longer be able 

to escape being subsumed as "one element in 

a purposive arrangement," but they can be a 

discomforting element.11Unsettling because 

unsettled in themselves, they are only 

superficially compatible with luxury. 

Society may think it has grown wise in no 

longer resisting the abstract painting that 

once resisted it, and try to swallow it 

whole without blinking. But the most 

radical abstract painting remains 

indigestible--peculiarly "out of sight," 

unseeable, ironically invisible. It is too 

hard for ordinary perception, which seeks 

comfort before insight, to swallow.12 

Radical abstract painting does not 

accommodate to decor, does not fit in, 

despite every effort to metabolize it into 

a "place setting." Indeed, it always seems 

oddly out of place, no matter how well one 

places it. No matter how glamorous its 

presence, it adds an odd tone of absence. 

No matter how much it communicates, it 

seems incommunicado. Thus it can never be 

completely neutralized into decoration, the 

power of its difference drained from it, 

because it does not submit to the usual 

processes of perception designed to 

foreclose on radical difference, subsume 

the uniqueness that is evident in 

irreconcilability. Decoration symbolizes 

the comfort that denies the anxiety aroused 

by the irreconcilably isolated self, so 

radically different from the self that 

falsifies itself by glorifying itself as an 

ornament of the world.
 

When it was unexpected, abstract painting 

forced itself on us like a bizarre eruption 

from the unconscious, breaking through the 

defensive everyday blindness we achieve 

through selective inattention, as Harry 

Stack Sullivan called it, of which 

decoration is a major instrument, leveling 

as it does whatever strangeness invades 

attention. Now that abstract painting has 

become expected, an academic category, its 

contemporary problem is to reassert its 

difference--not to restore the old sense of 

difference, but to test the authenticity of 

its difference and irreconcilability, its 

resistance to the sameness that decorative 

neutralization instigates in the name of 

society. It must show that the difference 

of radical abstract painting is not a 

gratuitous act of social defiance, but 

ontologically inherent. It is inherently 

nonconformist, because it is conforming to 

its own anxiety.


The task that Soulages has set himself, and 

that he sustains throughout his 

development, is to establish and define 

this radical difference. The absence and 

invisibility embodied in blackness--the 

apotheosis of absence and invisibility 

through blackness--is its major mode and 

instrument: the blackness of his abstract 

paintings is irreconcilable with decor, 

resists decor with all the power of its 

nothingness, even when, as in the later 

works, it sometimes seems more elegant than 

existential. It is through blackness that 

Soulages's abstract paintings articulate 

the social truth of their outsiderness, 

their nonidentity in a society that posits 

its own mythical self-identity--also 

symbolized by the uniformity of the 

decorative. Soulages's abstract black 

paintings do something more: they reveal 

the negation inherent in the forced social 

march to self-identity, a negation 

articulating the truth that abstraction 

informs all real relations among men, as 

Adorno said. It is this ironical revelation 

of the ambiguity of abstraction--the fact 

that it is as much an instrument of 

conformity as of uniqueness, that it 

establishes the compact majority as well as 

the difference of the outsider individual--

that makes Soulages's abstract black 

paintings truly radical. 


But they are even more extraordinarily 

radical: they reveal that to be 

unconditionally negative is to become 

conditionally positive. That is, their 

victory over decoration is more than 

Pyrrhic because they affirm, in the very 

act of making the negation implicit in 

abstraction explicit and uncompromising, 

the subliminal, attenuated feeling of being 

an incommunicado subject, which is to be an 

autonomous if isolated self. It is this 

feeling that the collectivization 

represented by the decorative is determined 

to destroy. In reaching, through their 

negativity, the truth that "by slaying the 

subject, reality itself becomes lifeless," 

Soulages's abstract black paintings restore 

a kind of dialectical life to the 

"powerless subject," thus showing that 

"reality" is not as "all-powerful" as its 

abstractness makes it seem.13 "Annihilating

reality" is revealed in all its self-

annihilation, which does not mean the 

subject has the power to undo the 

annihilating effect of abstract reality on 

it--the feeling that it is unreal--but does 

give it the courage to recognize itself in 

the black mirror of its emaciation,14 to

face the fact that continuous abstract 

relations have reduced it to a shadow of 

itself. But recognition of the fact that in 

everyday collective existence one has 

become an abstract, inwardly lifeless 

shadow of oneself, is to begin to recognize 

one's true self, for it is ironically 

mirrored by--hidden in--one's shadow. Such 

ironical recognition of one's shadowy 

reality gives one the courage to survive 

and feel real and emotionally full, rather 

than unreal and emotionally emaciated. For 

by admitting the truth to oneself, one 

becomes true to oneself, in however small a 

way, and thus transcends one's feeling of 

being annihilated--profoundly falsified and 

diminished in one's being--by the abstract 

collective. Perhaps such dialectical self-

recognition is no more than an artistic 

kind of survival, but it nonetheless 

testifies to the subject's will to live. 


The subject's emaciation becomes negatively 

sublime--a blackness that is too extreme to 

become the site of human fantasy, an 

infinity too black to be idealized into a 

decorative cornucopia, to be compromised in 

its stubborn immediacy. Soulages's 

blackness may seem to reverse, may seem to 

become "light " (luminous and less of a 

burden), may seem to become the color 

Soulages thinks it is, and indeed he often 

suggests that it is full of color, or hides 

color 15 --but it never disappears: it

remains insidiously absolute, omnipresent 

and omnipotent, a fearless negative 

transcendence, a symbol of his insight into 

nothingness, and acceptance and mastery of 

the anxiety it arouses. 


Soulages's blackness is the complete 

abstraction from reality that represents 

the unreality it has become, and thus 

allows the subject a certain reality, a 

certain right to exist, without 

guaranteeing it concrete existence, a home 

in the world, an end to its feeling that it 

is unreal, an empty abstraction.16 Soulages

may seem to reify blackness, but he uses it 

to re-radicalize abstract painting, to make 

it, once again, non-accommodating and 

heroically homeless--a refusal to play the 

decorative game of symbiotic belonging, the 

imaginary return to a world that gives one 

the illusion of being a significant part of 

it, and as such a radical statement of the 

nonidentity that is the only identity in a 

reality full of ready-made, abstract 

identities. The architecture of identity 

that Soulages constructs with his 

blackness--an architecture that changes the 

moment it stabilizes into self-identity, 

for it must maintain "the proportions of 

the interior,"17 and to be completely self-

identical is to become an exterior--is

always on the verge of collapse, always 

risks declaring its own nothingness, which 

confirms its subjective power as 

nonidentity and self-absence. In displacing 

his identity to art--it was "the only thing 

worth spending one's life on" he discovered 

early in life--he acknowledged the 

slipperiness of both, and the fact that 

life is only worth living when one does not 

try to earn one's identity the way one 

earns a living.18
 
 
3

Soulages has said that "there was nothing 

negative in [his] choice" of black,19 but

in origin his choice was not without a 

certain unconscious melancholy, as his 

remark that his first paintings were of 

"trees in winter, without their leaves"--

"trees...painted in black on a brown 

background"20 --suggests. Black remains "a

very violent color" for Soulages, a "very 

intense color, more intense than yellow, 

capable of giving rise to violent reactions 

and contrasts,"21 like a dead winter 

landscape. In fact, it is incandescent 

yellow that mitigates the futility of 

blackness in many of the early brown 

gouaches and paintings--they are to my mind 

an adult, abstract transposition of his 

bleak adolescent landscapes--along with 

Soulages's ambiguous attempt to architect 

blackness into an enigmatic emblem, an 

almost picturesque pictograph. While 

Soulages seems to agree with Matisse that 

"black is a color"--that it is "absurd" to 

make a distinction between black and 

color, that in choosing black one is "not 

rejecting the other colors"22 --unlike

Matisse he disinters it from nature, as 

though to render it as a nonobjective 

feeling, to use Malevich's term. In fact, 

Soulages discovered Malevich's desert in 

the barren winter landscape, and Soulages's 

subsequent abstract paintings are the 

esthetic equivalent of both, or rather 

abstract the emotionally rich barrenness of 

both.


In the history of modernist painting, 

blackness has two faces--a split identity. 

On the one side, it serves symbolism--

emotional realism. Kandinsky described it 

as 
 
 a totally dead silence...a silence 

with no possibilities...Black is something 

burnt out, like the ashes of a funeral pyre, 

something motionless like a corpse. The 

silence of black is the silence of death. 

Outwardly black is the colour with least 

harmony of all, a kind of neutral background 

against which the minutest shades of other 

colours stand clearly forward.23 


At the other extreme, the non-color of 

black epitomized art-as-art for Ad 

Reinhardt--the ultimate non-

representational purity.24 Art-as-art--art

as only itself, with a certain grand if 

perverse simplicity--is pure negation, pure 

absence. It is totally inexpressive--

untranslatable. Reinhardt's radical 

abstract black paintings cancel the mundane 

and herald transcendence, without giving it 

a content, for it has none. Their polished 

blackness shuts the world out, and makes 

them hermetically true to themselves. But 

that self--art--is unnameable; their 

blackness signifies that art is "selfless" 

as well as nonworldly. It does not mime 

internal or external reality (symbolism and 

realism). They are certainly not informed 

by any signs of Reinhardt's everyday self 

and desire, and in fact represent his 

personal achievement of selflessness and 

repudiation of desire. They are beyond 

experience and history, personal and 

collective, and as such timeless and 

spaceless. Thus his abstract black 

paintings convey art's unintelligibility to 

itself as well as its incomprehensibility 

to ordinary worldly, "realistic" 

consciousness. His irreducible blackness is 

the blank such consciousness draws on art's 

transcendence as well as the "form" of that 

transcendence. It establishes 

meaninglessness, but also a kind of 

alternate meaning. Reinhardt has been 

called the ultimate artist mystic: a kind 

of "anesthetic"--self-anesthetized--

fundamentalist.25


Soulages's development can be understood as 

a movement from Kandinsky's evocative use 

of blackness to Reinhardt's exhibition of 

it, in all its presentational immediacy, to 

use Alfred North Whitehead's concept, as a 

cul de sac absolute. But there is a crucial 

difference between Soulages and both 

Kandinsky and Reinhardt: the exquisite 

sensitivity of Soulages's brushwork, which 

he never stops refining, and the austerity 

of his constructions, which, unlike those 

of Reinhardt and the later Kandinsky, 

depend not on ready-made geometry, but on 

"powerful buttresses," Soulages's basic 

invention. They are "heavy bars" and 

"elementary gestures" in one, as Werner 

Haftmann says.26 The result is "a complete,

self-contained monumental icon" composed of 

"ponderous movements" and conveying 

"archaic strength," even when, in the later 

works, the movement becomes more 

systematic, repetitive, suave--ritualized, 

and thus intensified. Soulages does not 

fall between Kandinsky and Reinhardt, he 

ultimately transcends both, however much, 

initially, he may have been tempted by 

their methods and perhaps had similar 

ideas: the hypersensitive--ultrasensuous--

surface of his later paintings is neither 

altogether expressive nor simply an 

assertion of art-as-art, but radically 

esthetic. If Kandinsky's surfaces tend to 

be manic, and Reinhardt's surfaces look 

anesthetized, then Soulages's surfaces are 

unabashedly esthetic. For they offer 

sensory elements that seem too intense to 

contain, and thus seem to spread 

infinitely, yet are self-contained: a self-

grounding architecture of sensation. 

Soulages's later paintings architect their 

own containment--this is what his earlier 

paintings were struggling toward--without 

sacrificing their sensitivity, indeed, 

while growing in sensitivity, that is, 

incommunicado sensory quality. One might 

say, in Wilfred Bion's terms, that they 

have learned to perform the alpha function 

for themselves, which they could not 

initially do, however much they tried, for 

they were too full of tragedy, willingly or 

not.27 


However much Soulages might deny it, his 

early gestures are explosive traces of the 

tragedy that World War II was for France--

residues of a belated, risky action as well 

as a mourning for its failure, and the loss 

of self-respect or narcissistic wound this 

failure brought in its postwar wake. 

Soulages's early paintings are informed by 

an existentialist mentality if not 

existentialist doctrine, and like French 

existentialism they are an all too delayed 

and muted assertion of autonomy and 

declaration of freedom--a gestural emblem 

of the action and self-assertion that might 

have been. The subtle morbidity of 

Soulages's abstract black paintings of the 

late 1940's is evidence, as Bernard 

Ceysson writes, of "the profound effect" 

that "the moral and intellectual shock 

caused by the French defeat in 1940 and the 

German occupation of France" had on "the 

conscience of the individual."28 They are

works of conscience, and, as I will argue, 

conscience never left Soulages's work.

 
4

Soulages's account of the formative 

influences on his development is brief but 

telling. Two moments seem of particular 

importance. When he was about ten, he drew 

a "snow landscape," as he called it: "a 

series of lines in black ink on white 

paper," in effect an abstract "landscape 

under snow." He "was trying to recapture 

the brightness of light. The white paper 

began to shine like snow by contrast to the 

black lines." A few years later, he 

"learned to look at Romanesque art, the 

cathedral of Conques for example, where 

[he] was overwhelmed by the proportions of 

the interior."29 The Romanesque aspect of

Soulages's paintings is unmistakable. They 

convey a very Romanesque sense of strength, 

solidity, and solemnity--of an 

inexhaustible reserve of titanic power 

waiting to be released--in their 

architecture. They have the same enclosed 

appearance as a Romanesque interior. They 

are, I suggest, an abstraction of it. At 

the same time, bright light informs 

Soulages's black planes--as it does the 

dark Romanesque interior--and struggles to 

break through them, as well as to purify 

itself, to become more like the brilliant 

white light of the stars or freshly fallen 

snow than the yellow light of the sun or 

the reddish light of sunset. In fact, the 

black planes overlay and obscure the light, 

the way the black ink lines of his youthful 

snowscape overlaid the white paper. Is it 

simplifying Soulages's abstract paintings 

to say that their whole point is to find 

light in the dark--more particularly, the 

light that dwells in the darkness, and 

that, at the moment of revelation, is 

secreted by it, as it were? Soulages is a 

Gnostic, however unwittingly: he searches 

for the saving revelation of light, which 

seeps out of the darkness like sap out of 

bark.30
 

I am suggesting that the Romanesque 

interior is the model of self for Soulages, 

and that what he paints is the self at its 

most extreme and emaciated, to use Adorno's 

term again, and desperate for the light 

that can transfigure it. Again and again, 

in innumerable ways, light breaks through, 

onto the surface of Soulages's paintings, 

transfiguring it. The light that is always 

latent in the self, concealed within its 

blackness, suddenly becomes manifest--a 

kind of grace. Soulages paints this moment 

of breakthrough--of unexpected revelation, 

this sudden contradiction of darkness by 

light--again and again. He tries to recover 

his feeling of being overwhelmed by the 

abstract architecture of the Romanesque 

interior, and to architect esoteric 

abstract paintings that overwhelm us the 

same way. But he also offers us the same 

relief he experienced: light suddenly seems 

to invade the oppressive, massive black 

space, giving us a new sense of 

interiority. In his later paintings 

Soulages seems to have descended to the 

very crypt of the self, where the darkness 

is complete, and yet even there a certain 

thin, fragile light filters through the 

gloom. The dark lines he added to his 

youthful snowscape came from within him: 

the light was already there, outside him, 

in nature's snow, symbolized by the plane 

of white paper. In a sense, he taints it 

with his own interiority. That was not a 

given; it was something he had to discover. 

But in his later painting the black is 

already there, omnipresent, engulfing: he 

adds the lines of light. Soulages's 

dialectic--interior--has changed: blackness 

is now no longer the end that must be 

urgently expressed, but the starting point 

for subtle, almost inexpressible light.
 
 
5

In such works as 1948-2, 1948-4, and 1948-6 

Soulages struggles to organize his 

blackness, to give it shape, as though he 

could reconstruct a world out of its 

cinders. He is not entirely successful--the 

result looks more like a tattered emblem 

than a grand architecture, the fragment of 

an idea of form rather than a solid 

content--but he doesn't want to be 

successful. The sense of wreckage, the 

ironical incompleteness of a ruin, the 

feeling of a fragment that is a structure 

in itself, is more important than any 

rebuilding. The grid of 1948-2 is 

unresolved however self-enclosing, the 

curved gesture of 1948-4 is inconclusive 

however mysterious and cabalistic, and the 

firm verticals and decisive curves of 1948-4 

do not add up to a stable architecture. 

Everywhere there is light, but it is 

unrecognized--a secondary and atmospheric 

rather a primary presence. Indeed, through 

the early `50s, structure remains unstable 

however dramatic--a zone of conflict and 

contradiction, in which thick bar-gestures, 

of various densities of black (a broad, 

thinly painted, atmospheric underlayer, a 

more, thickly painted overlayer), tend to 

shoot off in opposite directions, at odds 

with each other, however much they seem 

like blocks from the same building, as in 

1951-14. There is more conspicuous 

organization to this forceful painting than 

the earlier ones mentioned--it seems to be 

an enigmatic, aggressive escutcheon, the 

mandala of a defiant self--but the 

resulting construction has no ground to 

stand on, however self-grounding it may be. 

In all these works the abstract black 

figure floats on a ground of impure light, 

which sometimes informs the figure as a 

kind of gesture, giving its blackness a 

reddish brown or dark orange cast, adding 

to its dimensionality and negative 

sublimity. It is as though Soulages is 

trying to give shape to the feeling of 

death that has infected him, in an attempt 

to exorcise it by making it "definite," but 

the forcefulness of the black suggests that 

it cannot be expunged. 


2 June 1953 has a similar asymmetrical, 

opaque black, cross-like structure in its 

center, dividing the work into four 

atmospheric quadrants of less intense 

black. The vertical and horizontal borders 

of the central structure are marked by 

streaks--outbursts--of light that form a 

kind of broken halo. The sophisticated, 

nuanced handling of the surface contrasts 

oddly with the stark, weirdly primitive 

icon in the center. 20 November 1956 is a 

grid of bar-gestures, not unlike 1948-2, 

but arranged in tiers on a white ground, 

with strong elements of orange in the 

central tier. One of the most dramatic of 

Soulages's disturbing, eccentric "crosses" 

is the climactic 6 January 1957: the 

intense, confrontational black structure 

that seems to project beyond--hover above--

the yellow ground it rests on, has an 

uncanny resemblance to the so-called papal 

cross. Its "finials," and the "panels" on 

the ends of several of the horizontals, 

give it a "medieval" look. All these works, 

to my mind, have, however obliquely, a 

reluctant, peculiarly angry, even bitter 

religiosity. 


Soulages suddenly smashes the structural 

mold he has struggled to establish: the 

pieces scatter, if still taking the shape 

of a grid-frame, in 27 August 1958, and 28 

December 1959 is a kind of pile-up of the 

bar-gesture fragments. Figure and ground 

already began to integrate into a single, 

ominous plane in 22 May 1959, and the works 

grow larger and larger, as 24 November 1963 

and 5 February 1964 indicate. They become 

oppressively black environments, if with 

startling "interruptions"--ruptures or 

rips--of light. Blackness seems to lose its 

footing on a plane of light in 6 November 

1964, but in general dominates, filling the 

canvas, as in 22 November 1967, the light 

lapping around its edges, sometimes biting 

at its corners, as in 25 May 1967, and 

sometimes filled with an inner orange 

illumination, made of similar bar-gestures, 

as in 20 October 1967. In other works, such 

as 21 September 1967, 25 September 1967, 

and 29 September 1967, it becomes more 

calligraphic than iconic--a kind of dense, 

incomprehensible glyph, twisted in on 

itself. 
 

Broadly painted, mural-sized works such as 

14 May 1968 and 4 January 1974, with their 

trans-human scale and eloquent vertical 

cleavages or seams of light-fragments--in 

17 January 1970 the broad, softly curved 

black and white verticals balance each 

other--can undoubtedly be compared to the 

similar, uniformly colored field paintings 

of Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, who 

also use a residual gesturalism, but 

Soulages remains much more economical in 

his means, leading to a more concentrated 

result. Soulages's field, however broad, 

seems more focused and, simultaneously, 

more ingeniously constructed. Also, he does 

not make transcendental claims for it; his 

field is not the product of a God-like 

"Act" of creation, as Still grandiosely 

thought his field paintings were--a 

mystification of the artist as well as the 

work of art--nor is each bar-gesture, 

however narrow or broad, thick or thin, a 

metaphysical signifier, as Newman's zips 

are supposed to be. Soulages's abstract 

painting is not a form of preaching, an 

attempt to save our souls, like that of 

Newman and Still. His paintings are not 

philosophy and religion in simplistic 

disguise--a disguise that simplifies them--

as Still's and Newman's are. Soulages, 

then, does not pretend to be dividing the 

Red Sea when he divides his canvas, only 

creating a certain tension of light and 

darkness, sometimes with a mediating zone 

of primary (yellow, red, blue) or 

complementary (orange) color between. Mind 

(but not God) exists in the concreteness of 

this tension--a precarious if self-

conscious balancing act between black and 

white, in which the former claims to have 

priority and all the power, a claim the 

latter subtly refutes--not as a deus ex 

machina supervising the tension, as in 

Still's and Newman's paintings. The tension 

of black and white may have a Gnostic 

dimension, as I think, but Soulages has no 

intention of intellectually or for that 

matter emotionally and rhetorically 

exploiting their difference--whatever its 

evocative, persuasive power--only of 

exploring its possibilities. Still and 

Newman want to rewrite the Gospel with 

their painting, but Soulages is simply 

purifying his experience of radical 

contrast until it becomes epiphanic. There 

is no anthropomorphic or picturesque 

residue in Soulages's paintings, as there 

is in those of Newman and Still, only a 

pure tension.


As though to insist on this point, Soulages 

simplifies--radicalizes--his paintings even 

further in the late `70s and `80s. The 

process can be studied in three works made 

around the same time: 27 February 1979, 

19 March 1979, and 14 April 1979. An opaque 

black bar and a uniform gesture of luminous 

lines--a reversal of the black lines of 

Soulages's early snowscape--oppose each 

other, like substance and luminous shadow, 

even though they constitute the same plane. 

The grand triptych 30 May 1979 is a 

climactic statement of this mode, with the 

gestural field more luminous, and the bar 

more resistant, than before. In the equally 

gigantic 7 February 1985 the luminous 

linear gesture has made a clean sweep of 

the field, with the black bar now reduced 

to a thin divider, as light once was. In a 

number of other 1985 and 1986 works 

Soulages integrates the black bar and 

luminous gesture in what might be called an 

intuitive seriality. These works are 

peculiarly ritualistic as well as driven. 

March 1986 is a particularly striking 

example. The severity yet strange vitality 

of this work--opaque bar and luminous 

gesture alternate vigorously in an 

irregular rhythm, sometimes stumbling over 

each other yet maintaining their dignity--

achieves a remarkable sense of nonidentity 

within self-sameness. In 18 February 1990 

white re-appears, a rectangle that takes 

the measure of the vertical work, which can 

be intuitively divided into rectangles of 

the same size. Its pendant, 23 February 

1990, has black in the same place. 

Proportion is crucial in both these 

"classical" works. Like 28 December 1990, 

30 December 1990, 5 January 1991, 14 

January 1991, 29 January 1991, 7 February 

1991 and 19 February 1991, they are modular 

constructions, however irregular--diagonal--

their divisions. The diagonal becomes 

dominant in 11 December 1991, but the same 

principle holds. 


Adorno has argued that expression and 

construction are the poles of 20th-century 

avant-garde production, and that each makes 

the most radical esthetic sense when it has 

nothing to do with and in fact makes 

nonsense of the other. But Soulages's late 

constructions, at once uncannily 

"Minimalist" and emotionally insinuating, 

suggest that in the current decadent, so-

called postmodernist situation of art, in 

which both expression and construction have 

become reified and exhausted their 

possibilities, only a crafty hybrid of the 

two can make fresh esthetic sense. Indeed, 

the split between expression and 

construction must be healed for art to 

grow, and Soulages attempts to accomplish 

it on the most fundamental level: that of 

gesture and geometry, figure and ground. In 

the late paintings they seem to converge 

and constitute each other, an achievement 

that was Soulages's ambition from the 

beginning. But even though figure and 

ground and geometry and gesture become 

identified with each other--form a 

subliminal unity or at least a concordance--

they maintain their autonomy, and thus 

remain nonidentical, even subtly 

discordant. Thus the paintings of the `80s 

and `90s are Soulages' most radical, daring 

works, for they carry his ambition to its 

logical, and simultaneously illogical, 

conclusion. 


They are also radical because black and 

white radiate with equal intensity and 

brilliance in them--in his youthful 

snowscape he wanted to capture the total 

"brilliance" of the scene--however 

different their textures and form, which in 

fact they repeatedly exchange. It is as 

though they have become the same substance. 

To call Soulages's late paintings abstract 

seems a misnomer, in view of the fact that 

black and white, and expression and 

construction, line and space, have become 

irreducibly concrete. Each has become 

unmistakably itself, while remaining 

inseparable and contradictory of each 

other. Thus the late paintings establish an 

irreducible solitude: a peculiarly 

agonizing solitude, for despite their 

determined attempt to heal the primitive 

splits in the self they never succeed in 

doing so, however much they actually seem 

to. For the splits are too deep, being the 

very fundament of the self, and yet there 

are few artists who have articulated them, 

and the self's core unity, as incisively 

and consistently as Soulages.31


"Soulages: The Black, the Light" was 

organized by Jean-Louis Andral, curator of 

the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de 

Paris, where it appeared Apr. 11-June 25, 

1996. The show subsequently traveled to the 

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, July 17-Sept. 

15, 1996. The above essay was originally 

published in French in the exhibition 

catalogue ($89.95, Paris Musees/Amis du 

Musee d'Art Moderne). This is its first 

appearance in English.





DONALD KUSPIT is professor of art history 

and philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook and A.D. 

White professor at large at Cornell University.




Footnotes

 T.W. Adorno,Aesthetic Theory (London, 

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 45

BACK


 D.W. Winnicott, "Communicating and Not 

Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain 

Opposites,"The Maturational Processes and 

the Facilitating Environment (New York, 

International Universities Press, 1965) p. 

187.

BACK


 T.W. Adorno,Negative Dialectics (New 

York, Seabury, 1973), p. 5.

BACK


 Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, p. 324.

BACK


 Clement Greenberg, "The Crisis of the 

Easel Picture,"Partisan Review, 15 (April 

1948): 484.

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 Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, p. 328.

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 Ibid. Kasimir Malevich made a similar 

point when he remarked that "objectivity, 

in itself, is meaningless...feeling is the 

determining factor." In his "desperate 

attempt to free art from the ballast of 

objectivity" he "took refuge in the square 

form"--the "desert" of geometry, "where 

nothing is real except feeling." Quoted in 

Herschel B. Chipp,Theories of Modern Art 

(Berkeley and London, University of 

California Press, 1968), pp. 341-42.

BACK


 Ibid., p. 325.

BACK


 Ibid.

BACK


 Winnicott, pp. 183-84, argues that "at 

the centre of each person is an 

incommunicado element, and this is sacred 

and most worthy of preservation." The 

"abstract picture" can concretize it, that 

is, can function as a "cul-de-sac 

communication (communication with 

subjective objects)" that "carries all the 

sense of the real." I think that Soulages 

paints this rare kind of abstract picture: 

his paintings articulate the isolated, 

sacred, incommunicado "secret self," "core 

self" or "true self," as Winnicott 

variously calls it. Only a desperate inner 

necessity could produce such radical 

abstract painting: for Soulages, it was the 

only means of psychic survival, that is, of 

feeling real and concrete in a world that 

made him feel unreal and abstract, of being 

true to himself in a world that made him 

feel false--a world in fact that constantly 

invites all of us to falsify ourselves, 

supposedly to survive. Ironically, radical 

abstract painting uses the world's 

abstractness against it, that is, redeems 

the world's objective abstractness by 

making it subjectively resonant--a 

dialectical feat that is an essential 

aspect of its radicality.

 To fully grasp Soulages's negation of 

the world's negation of the self (which is 

a kind of self-assertion), one must sharply 

distinguish it from Duchamp's negation, 

which is negation for the sake of negation--

a reification of negation--and as such an 

ironical embodiment of the worldly 

pseudoself (and thus a kind of self-

negation). Duchamp's negation was a 

deliberate "joke" and "lie"--a deliberate 

falseness, as he said. (Pierre Cabanne, 

Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp[New York, 

Viking, 1977], p. 24.) The result is not 

simply anti-art, but pseudoart. He not only 

negated art, but woman, with whom he 

unconsciously identified art, that is, she 

personified the truth of art, which is 

falseness. Woman is thus the ideal symbol 

of art, for she is as inherently false as 

art (as well as false to man): both are 

false ideals (idols) that Duchamp falsifies 

in order to make their basic falseness 

manifest. He plays a joke on both, making 

them seem lies--betrayers of the truth. But 

in fact he has falsified them by refusing 

to see their truth--their other side. In a 

dubious Solomon's wisdom, he has split 

them, and thrown away one half. Duchamp 

displaces his misogyny--his refusal to see 

the truth of woman--onto art. Or is it that 

he displaces his hatred and distrust of 

art--his sense of its disgusting falseness-

-onto woman? In either case, he has 

betrayed both, for he has told only half 

their story.

BACK


 Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental 

Reason (New York, Continuum, 1974), p. 99.

BACK


 Joseph Sandler,From Safety to Superego 

(New York and London, Guilford, 1987), p. 5 

notes that "perhaps the most convenient way 

of heightening safety feeling is through 

the modification and control of 

perception." To turn radically subjective 

abstract painting into decoration is to 

modify and control its perception--to make 

it recognizable in terms of everyday 

objective perception, and, more crucially, 

to deny its inconvenient incommunicado 

character, which is a threat to ordinary 

emotional safety.

BACK


 Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, p. 45.

BACK


 Ibid., p. 46.

BACK


 Marshall McLuhan thought that "On 

television colors rush at you as in a 

picture by Soulages." Quoted in Bernard 

Ceysson, "Interview with Pierre Soulages," 

Soulages (New York, Crown, 1979), p. 60. 

Soulages comments: "McLuhan must have been 

thinking about the pictures where the 

colors hidden underneath the black are 

revealed by scraping so that they take on a 

brilliance that does not come from the 

light received and reflected by the canvas, 

but seems to emanate from the canvas 

itself."

BACK


 Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Mind 

(New York, Brunner/Mazel, 1991|; Paris, 

Gallimard, 1982, as Theatres du Je), p. 9 

writes that "the psychotic plot turns 

around the unceasing struggle for the right 

to exist, against the subject's deep 

conviction....that the right to an 

independent life, or even to existence 

itself, was not desired." I think that 

Soulages's abstract black paintings, in 

affirming the isolated incommunicado sacred 

true self, are a defiant last ditch attempt 

to assert his right to exist despite 

society's psychotic plot against his 

existence, that it, its indifference to 

whether he--or any one of us--exists or 

not. It is his assertion of his 

independence from society, for all his--and 

everyone's--dependence on it, however much 

it has become an unfacillitative, abstract 

environment, as Adorno says.

BACK


 I am playing on Soulages's remark 

(Ceysson, p. 57) that he was "overwhelmed 

by the proportions of the interior" of the 

Romanesque cathedral of Conques. I will 

return to this remark later, for it is 

basic to an understanding of the 

sensibility involved in Soulages's abstract 

paintings, and as such helps explain their 

radicality.

BACK


 Ibid.

BACK


 Ibid., p. 60.

BACK


 Ibid., p. 57. Soulages: "Was my childhood 

fondness for bare trees due to my love of 

black as a color? Or was it the other way 

round? Did I begin to love black because of 

the trees in winter without their leaves; 

because of the way the black trunks and 

branches stood out against the background 

of sky or snow, making them look brighter 

by contrast; or was it because of my love 

for the texture of the wet bark? I shall 

never know" (Ibid. p. 50). Also: "What 

interested me when I was painting trees was 

the tracery of the twigs against the sky--

the way in which the background became 

brighter between the black branches." 

Slowly but surely Soulages realized that he 

was looking at the tree "in terms of an 

abstract sculpture, an interacting series 

of forms, tensions and colors." This was 

confirmed by his discovery of Mondrian's 

series of tree paintings.

 Soulages also notes (ibid. p. 84) his 

fascination with a "patch of tar," made by 

"the roadmaker's brush as he tarred the 

street," and also seen on a hospital wall. 

He was taken with "the viscosity, the 

transparency and opaqueness of the tar, the 

force with which it had been splashed onto 

the surface, and the way it had run as a 

result of the slope of the wall and the 

laws of gravity." It had been "abandoned," 

but remained "uncompromising" in its 

blackness, and evoked "the geological folds 

to which [it] had once belonged." Again, a 

certain experience of abandoned nature is 

Soulages's abstract point of departure. It 

is also his unconscious acknowledgment of 

his annihilation anxiety--his latent death 

wish, evoked by the society that has failed 

him, and thus traumatized him.

	In this context, it is hard not to 

think of Winnicott's remark that "a great 

deal is known, and is waiting to be 

harvested....about the meaning of black in 

the unconscious. Soulages is one of the 

great harvesters of black--one of the few 

not afraid to look steadily into its 

abyss." (D.W.Winnicott, "The Price of 

Disregarding Psychoanalytic Research," Home 

Is Where We Start From [London, Penguin, 

1986], p. 174.)
BACK


 Ibid., p. 60.

BACK


 Ibid.

BACK


 Wassily Kandinsky,Concerning the 

Spiritual in Art (New York, Dover, 1977), 

p. 39.

BACK


 See Ad Reinhardt, "Black as Symbol and 

Concept," Barbara rose, Ed.,Art As Art: 

The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (New 

York, Viking, 1975, Documents of 20th-

Century Art), pp. 86-88. "Black is 

negation," Reinhardt wrote (p. 101), and 

his black paintings were a "chain of 

negations," "ideogram[s] for what is beyond 

utterance," statements of the "Buddhist 

`theology of negation'" (p. 93). This means 

that they are "trans-subjective" (p. 114). 

Nonetheless, very subjectively and self-

contradictorily, Reinhardt identifies their 

"self-sufficiency" with that of the 

"original part-object, [the] breast" (p. 

74), that is, the primordial subjective 

object (according to Melanie Klein). Thus, 

if "the one object of fifty years of 

abstract art is to present art-as-art and 

as nothing else, to make it into the one 

thing it is only, separating and defining 

it more and more, making it purer and 

emptier" (p. 63), then the object of 

abstract art is to restore us to our 

original incommunicado subjectivity, which 

is inseparable from our identification with 

the breast.

BACK


 Winnicott, p. 185-86, writes of "the 

mystic's withdrawal into a personal world 

of sophisticated introjects...the loss of 

contact with the world of shared reality 

being counterbalanced by a gain in terms of 

feeling real." The mystic anesthetizes 

himself to the world, blanking it out, in 

order to become sensitive to the deepest 

layers of himself, which, in Soulages's 

case, are articulated as autonomous sensory 

experiences, experienced by the viewer as 

inordinately intense sensory stimuli.

BACK


 Werner Haftmann,Painting in the 

Twentieth Century (New York, Frederick A. 

Praeger, 1961), vol. 1, p. 345. James 

Johnson Sweeney,Soulages: Paintings Since 

1963 (New York, M. Knoedler, 1968), p. 7 

also notes Soulages's "Interest in 

architecture...particularly Romanesque 

architecture." 

BACK


 Hanna Segal, "The Function of Dreams," 

The Dream Discourse Today, ed. Sara 

Flanders (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 103 

writes that "beta elements are raw 

perceptions and emotions suitable only for 

projective identification. These raw 

elements of experience are to be gotten rid 

of. Beta elements are transformed by the 

alpha function [of a mother capable of 

containing projective identification, that 

is, of being a good breast] into alpha 

elements. Those are elements which can be 

stored in memory, which can be repressed 

and worked through. They are suitable for 

symbolization and formation of dream 

thoughts....Alpha function is also linked 

with mental space." I am arguing that the 

disturbing tragedy of France's fall, which 

could first be worked through after its 

liberation, aroused primitive feelings of 

tragedy in Soulages. He used art to contain 

them, as though in an abstract dream.

BACK


 Ceysson, Soulages, p. 27. One might say 

that Soulages conveys the feeling of being 

let down by France--the rapidity of its 

collapse in World War 11, which was moral 

as well as military--that he experienced as 

a youth.

BACK


 Quoted in ibid., p. 57.

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 Hans Jonas, "Gnosis, Existentialismus und 

Nihilismus,"Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit: 

Zur Lehre von Menschen (Gottingen, 

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), pp. 5-25 

shows how mysticism and existentialism 

correlate. Kurt Rudolph,  Gnosis:The Nature 

and History of Gnosticism (New York, Harper 

& Row, 1983), p. 55 writes that "gnosis," 

insight into the light of God while falling 

in the darkness of the world, is "a 

knowledge which has at the same time a 

liberating and redeeming effect....It is a 

knowledge given by revelation, which has 

been made available only to the elect who 

are capable of receiving it, and therefore 

has an esoteric character....All gnostic 

teachings are in some form a part of the 

redeeming knowledge which gathers together 

the object of knowledge (the divine 

nature), the means of knowledge (the 

redeeming gnosis) and the knower himself," 

at his most unequivocally subjective, that 

is, in his mystical identity.

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 Splitting--into good and bad (light and 

dark, satisfying and frustrating, secure 

and threatening)--is a fundamental 

mechanism of defense, discussed in 

particular detail by Melanie Klein and Otto 

Kernberg. W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, "Synopsis 

of an Object-Relations Theory of the 

Personality,"International Journal of 

Psychoanalysis, 44 (1963): 224 describes 

the splitting of the "original ego" as the 

"basic schizoid position." The mature ego 

synthesizes the opposites in ambivalence, 

but the split has done its damage: the ego 

remains susceptible to rupture from within.

BACK