Are we discovering a posthumous mystery of Pierre Soulages? Several works by the undisputed master of black see their paint slowly flowing again, as if the artist, with a last stroke of the brush, had brought his work back to life. In Toulouse, faced with this unique phenomenon, a CNRS research team takes a fresh look at the work of the Aveyron painter who died on October 22, 2022. At the crossroads of pictorial science but also optics and chemistry, their careful examination reveals countless details about the design of the paintings during the 1960s.
“It’s really sticky. We see small drops forming,” restorer Pauline Hélou de la Grandière, interviewed in a CNRS video. When she heard the news of this unprecedented degradation, this Soulages specialist and doctoral student at Cergy Paris University immediately wanted to investigate. If ordinarily, a canvas put to the test of time, ” ages, cracks and becomes increasingly brittle “, the researcher explains to France Info that, at Soulages, a “ quite the opposite phenomenon takes place.. Faced with a case revolutionizing the approach to the conservation of works of art, Pauline Hélou de la Grandière is moving into unknown territory.
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“What is very strange is that paintings by other artists who created works in Paris, in the same periods, are concerned”, adds the specialist. Far from being an isolated phenomenon, the dripping of paint from canvases actually affects other works from the same period. These ” a few dozen “ of paintings raise new issues and reasoning, which could explain such an anomaly and help prevent it on other similar paintings. All painted between during the same period, these works also share the particularity of having been exhibited immediately after their creation, sometimes very far from their place of origin. The transportation caused by homelessness, the dark storage or sulphide pollution could therefore be determining factors in the liquefaction of the pictorial components.
If all these hypotheses are evoked by the current study, no certainty yet exists, the researchers having to constantly cross their research objects ” Each time we find a hypothesis, it must be verified and above all it must not be verified in works that have no problem. explains the researcher. Thanks to devices specially created for the occasion, the team can monitor the shine and deterioration of the canvases. “It is not excluded that it could have existed before, but with less visibility, because the layers of paint were thinner”, develops Pauline Hélou de la Grandière.
They said it in the Obs – Pierre Soulages: “What we discover too quickly is often what we already know”
Before time gets the better of Soulages’ work, scientists are on a mission to find a cure for him. At stake: the survival of the work and the heritage of the French painter and engraver. Scattered in 110 museums around the world, his work bears witness to the career of a legendary artist, particularly known for his use of the reflections of the color black. A key figure in abstract art of the 1940s, Pierre Soulages was the most expensive painter in the world during his lifetime (17.8 million in 2021). At the origin of the creation of the television channel Arte, the artist appears, according to the art critic Jacques Bouzerand, “ among the 10 or 15 names of our two centuries who will forever count in the world history of art. »
