Exterior View: Pierre Soulages’s Conques Windows
The Abbey Church of Saint Foy in Conques, France
I am not a fan of Pierre Soulages’s paintings. Soulages was one of the many French artists who were a part of the postwar European movement known as Abstraction Lyrique. In some ways the European counterpart to Abstract Expressionism in mid-century America, art of the Abstraction Lyrique movement can be characterized as anti-compositional, expressive, and spontaneous. To me, many of Soulages’s early paintings recall the work of the Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline, but without Kline’s emotions, will of expression, and lyricism.
Soulages’s oeuvre has often been explained through the standard paradigm of modernist art as a self-contained entity. According to a popular idea in art-historical circles between the 1940s and 1960s (as seen, for example, in Clement Greenberg’s influential essay “Modernist Painting,” published in 1960), painting should be about its own area of competence. Modernist painters moved away from the tradition of painting as representational and figurative (a painting of a landscape or a portrait of a wealthy patron, for instance) towards exploring what was unique to the discipline of painting: the application and arrangement of pigments on a flat surface. Soulages himself has spoken of his work in terms of this modernist cliché, referring to his paintings in terms of “organisation de formes et de couleurs.” The French philosopher Alain Badiou also stresses “the feeling of self-sufficiency” evoked by Soulages’s paintings. What he means by “self-sufficiency” is that a painting that is deprived of figurative content refers to nothing but itself or refers back to the viewer. An abstract painting does not impose a meaning but it calls for the sensitive appreciation from the viewer in order to institute a meaning. Badiou continues his characterization of Soulages’s paintings as self-contained entities: “Painting is not a critique; it is an affirmation. An affirmation in painting, but also an affirmation of painting.” Soulages’s commentary on his own work supports such an interpretation, since he rejects the notion that we can understand a work of art by studying its historical context. “Paintings,” says Soulages, “that are reducible to their milieu, era, or social context can be of interest only to the historian, because they have become mere documents, symptoms of their times. True painting is trans-temporal; it endures throughout time.” But his comments leave me wondering: what happens when we stop believing in “true painting” and in artifacts that endure through time?
Further, Soulages’s recent turn toward an “architectural” way of exhibiting his works—that is, attaching paintings by cables and leaving them hanging between the floor and ceiling—also leaves me perplexed. Speaking of such installations of black paintings, Soulages says that “a painting on a wall is a kind of window. On cables, it becomes a wall.” While this is probably true, it also leaves me uninspired. Unlike other abstract artists from the 1950s and 60s—Mark Rothko, for instance—whose architectural paintings created and defined spaces you could inhabit with your whole person, Soulages’s “walls” do not define a space as much as they demarcate a space, create a boundary, or just confront the viewer.
However little I admire his paintings, I find Soulages’s windows at Conques simply incredible. The Abbey Church in Conques is a Romanesque church from the eleventh century. Soulages designed the 104 unstained-glass windows of the Abbey Church between 1987 and 1994. Here, Soulages adopts geometrical shapes that do not characterize his windows in any strictly devotional way, rejecting any of the standard figurative or representational options that you would normally expect to see in a cathedral window, such as depictions of saints and biblical stories. “Right from the start,” Soulages says, “I was moved by the desire to serve and respect this architecture, as it came to us, in the purity of its lines and proportions, the modulations of stone tonalities, the order of its light and the life coming from such a space.” Soulages’s commitment to the modernist vocabulary of art as “organisation de formes et de couleurs” is clear from this statement, since it is not the cathedral as a spiritual site that interests him as much as the purity of lines, proportions, stone tonalities, the order of its light.
The windows at Conques seen from the outside seem to be walled with a metal sheet. They give a sense of inaccessibility to the basilica and seem to transform the church into a fortified citadel. Windows are, of course, a source of light and what mediates between an interior and an exterior space. In painting, as the English art critic John Berger notes, windows were treated either as sources of light (as in Caravaggio’s “Calling of St. Matthew” or Vermeer’s “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window”), or were used to frame nature or a story (as in innumerable examples of Dutch paintings). Seen from the exterior, Soulages’s window rejects this pictorial tradition too: his windows give the impression that no light enters by them nor do they frame an event or biblical story or figure. The windows appear opaque, an abstract pattern of lines gently modulated. We see nothing. They show nothing. But more precisely, they represent an interruption, a modern one, in the homogenous body of the Romanesque church.
A close up of Soulage’s Stained Glass Windows.
I happened to be thinking about Soulages’s windows since so many churches are closed due to COVID-19, and believers have been forced to practice their prayers in their own houses or attend services online. While I do not want to exploit any metaphorical reading of these windows, especially in our current state of emergency, I find that Soulages’s windows—against his own theory that his art is completely self-referential, independent from historical time and place—resonate with our own historical moment. The exterior appearance of the windows—in which no light seems to enter and no light seems to leave—recalls the current closure of churches to communities of believers and non-believers alike. Soulages’s windows turn against themselves, in opposition to their own concept, and thus become uncertain of themselves. Likewise, a church that is closed appears as the site of an impossible experience, a place turned into a non-place temporarily surrendered to the domination of the world. From modernist windows about themselves, they become art because of their mimesis of the marginalized and the alienated.
Donato Loia is a Doctoral Candidate in Art History at the University of Texas.