Knockout Blow

"Matisse used to design the outline of a chair, then design the colors, and fill them in. Or he designed the color and then the chair. But one comes after the other. Moi, je fais tout d'un coup [I do everything at once]--contour, matiere, surface, color, line, all in the same stroke." Thus Paris Painter Pierre Soulages, at 37 a roaring commercial success and winner of several international art prizes, describes the effort behind his huge, bulking canvases--massive, broad strokes of dark paint laid on the light background with brush, board, strips of leather and cardboard to make a bold structural pattern that is now his signature and trademark.

"Feel, Think, Imagine." One of the new breed of action painters. Soulages follows the trail blazed by Hans Hartung (TIME, April i), but carries to the extreme the view that "reality is not in appearance alone, but also in what men feel, think, imagine." For him, even the calligraphy of brush strokes is anathema, a romantic hangover from the days when the viewer, willy-nilly, could follow the painter's hand, guess and second-guess his intentions and hesitations. Soulages. with his plank-sized strokes, aims to hit the spectator with one knockout blow.

Last week, with his latest show at Manhattan's Kootz Gallery, Soulages succeeded in delivering a massive K.O. One painting was sold even before it was up on the gallery walls. Six more were sold on opening day at from $1,500 to $4,500. By week's end, with orders telephoned in from California and Chicago and two museums lined up to buy, the gallery was able to announce: "There are 13 pictures in the show. We have sold 14."

"A Great Sign." Born a blacksmith's son, Soulages grew up with the hunters and fishermen of his native town of Rodez in Southern France, at 14 decided to become a painter. His first loves were the Druid monuments in the region and the massive Romanesque architecture of the church at Conques. Says Soulages: "I detest the Renaissance." During his teens, Soulages delighted in sketching trees against the sky, boned up to pass the academic exams for Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts. But once entered, he was convinced by exhibitions of Cezanne and Picasso that academicism was not for him, went home to work on his own. Within a year, tall (6 ft. 3 in.) Artist Soulages was in uniform as an artilleryman, after the fall of France worked as a farm laborer.

After the war, Soulages began simplifying his trees to stark black lines. In 1947 he made his momentous step: "I organized the lines into a great sign which suppresses the descriptive tendency of the line." The results won the praise of oldtime Surrealist Picabia, who called Soulages' work the best painting in the 1947 Salon des Surindependents. When a black-and-white Soulages painting was used as the cover for the catalogue of a show of young painters traveling to West Germany, Soulages was made. Repeating the formula ever since has only increased his fame, placed him in the front ranks of French abstract painters. As a leading exponent of the new school. Soulages delivers its manifesto: "The School of Paris doesn't exist--there is only the school of freedom. We have learned to be free."

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