Pierre Soulages: a 1956 painting bought in New York by architect Walter Netsch

Presented in 1957 at the Kootz Gallery in New York, this work belongs to the period of maturity that Pierre Soulages reached in the mid-1950s. The artist, who had already exhibited regularly in the United States, asserted a painting style structured around matter and gesture, with no concessions to lyricism.

Produced in the mid-1950s, Peinture 81 x 60 cm, October 27, 1956 marks this inflection point, when Soulages, abandoning all preoccupation with order and composition, explores the very matter of black to make it the principle of his construction. He developed an unapologetic working method based on the balance of mass and the tension of emptiness. His painting moves away from lyrical resonances towards a rougher structure of equilibrium, in which black is not an absolute but a substance : it catches the light, modulates it, counteracts it. Unlike the monumental canvases that follow, the format chosen here concentrates energy on a restricted plane. The thick, matte paste, hollowed out by the knife blade, reveals in places the weft and ochre breakthroughs that enliven the surface.

Early success in the USA

By the end of the 1940s, Soulages was already enjoying early success in the United States. In 1948, James Johnson Sweeney, who had just left his position as curator at MoMA in New York, visited his Paris studio and acquired several works. This first contact marked the beginning of a lasting link with the American scene. From 1954 onwards, the Kootz Gallery, on Madison Avenue, exhibited his paintings eight times, revealing his work to a public of collectors who were quickly won over. Peinture 81 x 60 cm, October 27, 1956, presented at the same gallery in 1957, was acquired by the American architect Walter A. Netsch (1920-2008), a major figure in Brutalist Modernism and designer of the US Air Force Academy campus in Colorado Springs, for which he notably designed the cadet chapel – a listed monument in 2004.

Walter A. Netsch: architect and collector

Trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Netsch established himself in the 1950s as one of the leading theorists of architectural structure through his famous ” fieldtheory “, based on the rotation and intersection of squares to generate complex spaces. In a 1995 interview for the Art Institute of Chicago’s Chicago Architects Oral History Project, he spoke of his interest in the principles of spatial structuring, likening his approach to European abstract painting, in particular that of Mondrian and post-war artists who thought of the surface as a field of balances. With his wife, law professor and politician Dawn Clark Netsch (1926-2013), he formed a couple of patrons attentive to the dialogue between art, architecture and modernity. They were at the head of a vast collection, presented in 2006 at the Northwestern University library (Evanston, Illinois), which today houses part of their archives. This painting remained among their works for several decades, before joining a first European collection in 1990.