Film 影像 | Pierre Soulages and Franz Kline

Brett Gorvy: I think one of the easy comparisons that people seem to make, is this comparison between an artist like Franz Kline and Soulages. And when I stand in front of a painting like this, it’s very easy for me to see why this isn’t Franz Kline and why the gesture is not actually the gesture of abstract expressionism, or at least understood through the American lens of abstraction expressionism.

Emilio Steinberger: Before Soulages actually traveled to America in the ‘50s, the critics at the time were trying to compare Soulages to Franz Kline. In fact Soulages’s black paintings and marks were three years before Franz Kline started to make his.

Brett Gorvy: if you think about the American trajectory, Franz Kline tries to define his language in 1950, Rothko defines his language in ’50, Pollock ‘49. They are simultaneous discoveries in a way. Clearly the reception of Soulages in America in the ‘50s was, he was positioned very much alongside the top abstract expressionists. And it was very interesting to see that when the Guggenheim opened up in 1959, there Soulages is front and center, in the main atrium alongside Brancusi.