Bold and monumental, Pierre Soulages’ 'Peinture, 7 février 1957' confronts the viewer with dynamic strokes of thick black paint layered upon sweeping passages of translucent, gauzy blue. A definitive moment in his artistic practice, the years 1956 to 1957 saw Soulages’ paintings evolve in a new direction. With broad passages of black paint which would become his signature, works from this period have a unique energy, internal drive, and dynamism. According to Pierre Encrevé’s catalogue raisonné, the best examples of this tendency include the present work and two further paintings, both in museum collections: 'Peinture, 1er août 1956' (no. 238), in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and 'Peinture, 14 août 1956' (no. 242), housed at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
In 1957, Soulages garnered major international attention, receiving the Windsor prize in Paris as well as first prize at the International Exhibition in Tokyo, which he was awarded conjointly with Sam Francis. Significantly, the same year also marked the artist’s first trip to New York for his solo exhibition at the acclaimed Kootz Gallery. It was at this seminal monographic show that the present work was purchased by Jacques Gelman, the renowned collector of 20th century European art whose collection now resides in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In a letter from Samuel Kootz in advance of the exhibition, the gallerist predicted excitement mounting for Soulages in New York: "I have been enormously satisfied with the paintings you sent me. I believe they do you great credit. In this, I find all our American painters agree, as well as the collectors and museum directors like Sweeney and Barr, both of whom like the show immensely. I feel very strongly this exhibition will entrench your reputation here in New York" (S. Kootz, in a letter to Soulages, May 3, 1954, quoted in P. Encrevé, Soulages: L’oeuvre complet, Peintures, I. 1946-1959, Paris: Seuil, 1994, p. 158). Having previously shown his work with Kootz in 1954, Soulages’ international reputation preceded his own travels; indeed his reception in America was more prominent than in his native France. He enjoyed an exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago and inclusion in the New Decade show at the Museum of Modern Art, and was warmly introduced to local artists. The curator Sam Hunter hosted a party in his honour, and Soulages received further invitations to the studios of Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline.
Between 1956 and 1958, Soulages carried out only four paintings with the same vertical format and momentum, the present work being the largest at nearly two metres tall. The others are 'Peinture, 4 août 1957' (no. 293), 'Peinture, 6 août 1956' (no. 239) (Australian National Gallery, Canberra) and 'Peinture, 7 mars 1958' (no. 319). This orientation marks a departure from the artist’s previous tendency toward structuring the canvas horizontally. Here stacked vertical swatches of black are juxtaposed against a striking diagonal sweep, introducing a dynamism to the canvas. Soulages likes this idea of disrupted repetition, this staccato rhythm which brings energy to the painting. This is emphasised by his answer to Pierre Schneider, when asked during a visit to the Louvre about his favourite painting at the museum: without hesitating Soulages mentioned Bataille de San Romano by Paolo Uccello, explaining that "these repetitions, this vertical perpetually broken by diagonals, the space created by this repeated beating. This inextricable mixture of coherency and incoherence" particularly attracted him (P. Schneider, 'Au Louvre avec Soulages’, Preuves, no. 143, June 1963, pp. 46-53).
Often placing his canvases on the ground and working above them, Soulages used a knife or spatula to scrape the layer of paint while still fresh to reveal the layers of vivid blues, creating a sublime transparent surface from the most opaque black. This subtle interplay between the black and the underlying blues exemplified in the present work captures one of the key aspects of Soulages’ painting. The expanses of black offer up chromatic possibilities for other colours, in this case by adding contrast to the blue, making it appear luminously vibrant. As Rygg Karberg suggests: "Soulages makes the blue color shine – because the blue is intensified by black, or because a bright ground shines through the blue" (A. Rygg Karberg, Painting the Light, exh. cat., Vienna: Sammlung Essl, 2006, p. 22). It is this reductive process of pulling colour that Soulages employs to generate the light in his mysterious and enchanting black canvases.
To many, the paintings Soulages created during the 1950s are the most prized and admired. Only fifty-eight of these works are 195 x 130 cm or larger (this was a standard-sized canvas the artist used often). Of this group, only approximately twenty-five of these large-scale masterpieces are left in private hands, with others in numerous prestigious museum collections including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Musée national d'Art moderne, Paris; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich, and the Tate Gallery, London. Within this group, just fourteen are larger than 195 x 130 cm, including 'Peinture, 7 février 1957', nine of which are in museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art moderne, Toulouse; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich; Musée d’Art moderne, Paris; and the Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis.
