A great name in contemporary painting, a leading literary and political figure: this is the winning cocktail of this auction organized on Saturday 23 January in Normandy.

A luminous painting by Pierre Soulages that belonged to the poet and former President of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor will indeed be on sale in Caen.

This abstract oil on canvas made up of large black lines, reminiscent of a sort of asymmetrical totem, on an almost golden yellow background, is estimated "from 800,000 to one million euros", specifies the auction house, Caen auctions .

The work, entitled "Painting 81 x 60 cm, December 3, 1956", had been acquired by Léopold Sédar Senghor that year during a visit to the artist's studio in Paris, recalls Caen auctions.

Soulages made a very similar one a month later, according to the same source.

>> To read also: "At 100 years old, the painter Pierre Soulages continues his work"

Potential foreign buyers from Switzerland and Germany have already come forward, the auction house said at a press conference on Thursday.

The legatee of the work, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a friend of the sister of the wife of the poet who died in 2001. Disappeared in turn in 2019, Colette Senghor bequeathed the painting to her sister who died a year later.

Before the outrenoir

Hanging for a long time in the office of Léopold Sédar Senghor in Verson, near Caen, where the couple lived from the 1980s, the work is characteristic of the painter's work in the 1950s, before he passed to the outrenoir , this universe imagined by Soulages in 1979 when he turned completely black.

"We are starting to find this very important work on dark matter" sometimes thick, sometimes translucent, "in large horizontal and vertical areas", and on the contrast with here "a very bright background", explained to AFP Me Solène Lainé, auctioneer.

"I also use tools which were not originally made for painting (...), scrapers, long blades of wood or leather", for "with a single gesture (...), spread a large area ", explained Pierre Soulages in a radio interview in 1965 broadcast on France Culture in 2019.

That year, a Soulages reached 9.6 million euros (including costs) at auction in Paris.

"A blow that made me waver"

The former Senegalese president was a fervent admirer of the now 101-year-old painter, considered the greatest living French artist.

"The first time I saw a painting by Pierre Soulages, it was a shock. I received a blow in the pit of my stomach that made me wobble, like the affected boxer who suddenly breaks down", writes the first African who became an academician in "Lettres nouvelles" (1958).

"Soulages' paintings always remind me of Negro-African paintings, even sculptures," adds the cantor of negritude, a movement for the defense of the cultural values ​​of the black world that he invented with the West Indian, Aimé Césaire.

In 1974, in an inaugural speech at a Soulages exhibition in Dakar, the Senegalese president saluted his art, "brother of Negro-African art not by imitation but by nature".

"Black has its light and its softness", underlined the poet in 1960 in an article entitled "The poetry of Pierre Soulages".

"For traditional Negro-African painters, it is black which naturally expresses life, while white expresses Death," he added.

With AFP

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