Black flowers blossom: Bachelard, Soulages and the material imaginary of abstract painting

• Autores: Natalie Adamson
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 39, Nº. 4, 2016 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Material imagination: Art in Europe, 1946-72), págs. 654-675
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In mid-1948 the artist Pierre Soulages painted a singular suite of works on glass with tar. Experimenting with the particular qualities of the materials and the interplay between surface and ground, these paintings are the result of a process that was paradoxically both materialist and poetic. This essay situates the tar-on-glass paintings at a turning point in Soulages’ early practice as an abstract painter and within the specific context of a materialist discourse that closely intertwined artistic practice and philosophical thought during the 1940s in France. Gaston Bachelard’s influential theory of the material imagination is aligned with a radical field of artistic and poetic experimentation exemplified here by Soulages’ painting practice. In distinct but overlapping ways, the abstract artist and the philosopher demonstrate a commitment to a material imagination whose images are excavated by the dual imperatives of objective experience and subjective intuition