Join History of Art for the next in the Research Seminar Series chaired by Professor Patricia Allmer.

This lecture will be hybrid. Please book your ticket for attendance in person or online. Further details on how to access the lecture will be sent to you following booking.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Higgitt Gallery.

Imprisoned by Time: Abstract Painting and Temporality in the Work of Pierre Soulages

Abstract

All his long life, painter Pierre Soulages (1919-2022) emphasised the significance of the experience of time for his work. In 1963, he declared to philosopher Jean Grenier: “time seems to me to be one of the preoccupations to which my painting testifies.” In 1980, speaking with critic Catherine Grenier about his new, entirely black canvases, Soulages expressed his preoccupation with time in a deceptively simple declaration, noting, “you see, the verb is usually in the past tense, but I prefer painting in the present tense.” And a couple of years later: “you’re a prisoner of the present.”

In this talk, I outline the ways that ideas about time and the texture of temporal experience came to constitute the kernel of pictorial relations in Soulages’s abstract paintings over the course of time (some eight decades). In setting Soulages’s paintings and statements alongside the thought of Hannah Arendt, Gaston Bachelard, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Henri Meschonnic, Roland Barthes, and some others, I will explore concepts of historical time and the present tense; the role of rhythm; and the elaboration of an idiorhythmic relation to time in artistic practice.

About Natalie

Natalie Adamson is Professor in the School of Art History, University of St Andrews, where she has taught since 2002. Her research and teaching concerns twentieth-century visual culture, particularly the art, politics and intellectual culture of France after 1940 and its global relationships; abstract painting; surrealism; art criticism; and the history of photography, especially the photobook. Her publications include Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944-1964 (2009/2016); In Focus: Around the Blues 1957, 1962-3, by Sam Francis (2019); and the co-edited publications Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-Garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960 (2009) and Material Imagination: Postwar European Art, 1946-1971 (2016). She has been the recipient of a Major Leverhulme Research Award (2016-2018) and a Getty Scholar (2015). This talk relates to her forthcoming monograph Pierre Soulages: A Radical Abstraction (Yale University Press).

Access

Please let email eca.events@ed.ac.uk if you have any access requirements.

Please see ECA's privacy notice for more information on how your personal details provided will be used and stored.