Said Pierre Soulages, quoted in "Pierre Soulages, Leading French Abstract Painter, Dies at 102 Once called 'the world’s greatest living artist,' Mr. Soulages was best known for exploring the possibilities of the color black" (NYT).
For more than four decades, Mr. Soulages worked every possible variation on black in an evolving series of paintings he called “outrenoir,” or “beyond black,” sometimes using spoons or small rakes to create new textures in his thick slabs of paint and evoke subtle effects of color and light.
“Some mornings, it is a silvery gray,” he told the critic Bernard Ceysson in 1979. “Sometimes, capturing the light reflected from the sea, it is blue. At other times it can be tinged a coppery brown. In fact, it always corresponds to the light that falls on it. One day, I even saw it green: There had been a storm, and there was a blaze of sun on the trees not far away.”
Imagine spending 4 decades painting in black paint. Not black shapes on white, but all black, with the variations in brushstrokes and texture.
And then he is "commissioned to make 104 windows for the Romanesque abbey church of Sainte-Foy in Conques." This is 11th century architecture. What do you do?
Rather than design stained-glass windows, he devised a series of translucent panes, framed by black steel bars, whose variable thickness diffused and modulated the incoming light. The windows were installed in 1994.
Here's a documentary. Go to 38:35 to get to the church windows:
१८ टिप्पण्या:
Perceptual illusion, yes the middle bar appears to change but it's solid even gray:
https://openclipart.org/detail/269745/simultaneous-contrast-illusion
Color is even more bonkers, as the brain sees the same colors as very different based on surrounding shades. The center squares are the same exact colors:
http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/shikisai2005.html
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.210369597
“Paint it black. Paint it black you devil.”
How many people have been called "the world's greatest living artist" by someone? I suspect hundreds.
Seems a little pretentious. What about that guy in the jungle hut that no one knows about?
The blackest black is musou black. You can buy it on amazon. It is a deep, bewitching and abyssal black. It is stealth, and also refracts sources of photons under night vision. It has extremely weird properties under nvg Gen 3plus. More on that later.
Buy it. Paint your tabi-socks in it and pretend you're a ninja. You won't be disappointed.
My brain first saw Out Renoir before realizing it was Outre Noir. I found it completely plausible an art movement could be anti-Renoir.
Waldemar Januszczak is my absolute favorite Art Expert, Art Critic, and Art Educator...
Love this guy!
Thanks, Ann.
I wanna see it painted
Painted black
Black as night
Black as coal
I wanna see the sun
Blotted out from the sky
I wanna see it painted, painted, painted
Painted black, yeah
Paint It Black
the Rolling Stones
(1966)
Wikipedia
I'm sure Anish Kapoor would disagree, disagreeably.
I'm sure Anish Kapoor would disagree, disagreeably.
world's greatest - definition
A phrase which linguistically dubs someone as better than all the rest but which in reality simply means someone thinks they are or more probably is just doing promotion.
Apparently, as all it takes is someone calling someone 'the world's greatest living artist'...
This is a painting by the world's greatest living artist.
Who knew?
By the way - black is the absence of light so black, by definition, cannot be a color. If you think it is, please tell me into which wavelength band it falls.
Every artist knows this, they just use 'color' because ordering a tube of paint by describing it as a 'pigmented oil application that doesn't reflect light' is simply too cumbersome.
This art seemed most like Rorschach blots, only, being Artist blots by an artist, one is entitled to read whatever cultural message one wants into them.
I see it as Twitter HQ on October 28 and so it is entirely appropriate to see darkness as really lit up by inner light. Let that sink in.
I completely completely rejected the Artist's stained glass windows in a Catholic church. There is no message of salvation in stained glass prison bars and we can see human insufficiency in real prisons behind real prison bars if we want to.
And I rejected the Art Critic's assertions that Soulages was presenting the future and so was an immediate, contemporary classic. I considered this merely French verbal cleverness.
Then, listening on, I came to the part where the Philosopher starts talking about how the born come out of the darkness of the maternal womb which, therefore, must be a lighted place like the lighted world since it prepares us for it. I think he said this. I wanted to think Soulages or else the Philosopher had made some kind of new and powerful argument against abortion but I just couldn't get myself to see those black scrawls as either anti-abortion or like the unborn in the womb. To me the unborn look like this:
https://pixels.com/featured/six-week-old-embryo-biophoto-associatesscience-photo-library.html
Now, how you would show this little guy without light and yet show him as he really is (whatever really is means), I don't know. But I don't think Soulages did it.
Maybe it's just me but it looks like the emperor doesn't have any clothes on.
'World's greatest living artist' and I bet nobody on this blog ever heard of him.
Interview with the "Paint it black, you Devil" girl.
[Pierre Soulage,] once called the world's greatest living artist...
Now that he's NOT living, can we have some real art for a change?
He made the glass for 95 windows and 9 meurtrières at Sainte-Foy de Conques, ha. I spent almost ten minutes trying to figure out what a meurtrière is and then allowed myself to be sidetracked to 'murder hole' which is something entirely different in English or Scots usage (and which doesn't appear to be recorded in the OED, by the way). A meurtrière is a slot or opening made in a fortified structure to allow projectiles to be shot or thrown at attackers. Requiescat in pace.
Say what you like about republican France, it is a praiseworthy thing to my mind that the head of state intends to honor Pierre Soulages in an un hommage national on November 2 at the Louvre (which, coincidentally, is the feast of All Souls). Of course, one can quibble about the other three eminences so honored: Braques, Le Corbusier, Malraux.
"World's greatest"
The World Series is running now, and I happen to be re-reading The Great Gatsby. In which there are a couple mentions of the "World's Series". Which happens to be the original and therefore correct nomenclature for that sportsball event.
Whatever happened to the World newspaper, anyway?
François Hollande described Soulages as "the world's greatest living painter".
That's sort of on par with the aesthetic judgements of Walter Mondale or Mike Dukakis.
I took «outrenoir» to mean "out Renoir" in the sense of taking what Renoir did much further than Renoir dared go -- out Renoiring old Pierre-Auguste.
There already is an anti-Renoir "Renoir Sucks At Painting" or "God hates Renoir" movement. They have been strangely silent lately.
I hope they aren't planning a terrorist act.
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