An abstract work by French painter Pierre Soulages, which had belonged to former Senegalese President Senghor, was sold for nearly 1.5 million euros.
Rating and sentimental value. Contemporary art galleries know it well: the combination of a famous author and a prestigious owner is often a winner in auctions. This Saturday, January 23, in the Norman city of Caen, the listed artist was the centenary Pierre Soulages, often considered the greatest living French artist. And the former star owner was the poet and former Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor, Norman by adoption until his death in 2001. Here then is a master and an academician virtually united, the specialist of the pictorial “outrenoir” and the champion of black identity.
In order not to deflower the abstract character of the work sold last weekend, it is entitled “Painting 81 x 60 cm, December 3, 1956”. It is an oil on canvas made up of large black lines on an almost golden yellow background. It was acquired the year of its creation, during a visit by Senghor to the artist’s Parisian studio. Upon discovering the work, the poet will declare to have “received a blow in the pit of his stomach” which made him “waver, like a boxer affected who suddenly collapses”. History does not say what the purchase price was …
Allegory of Negritude
After the death of the former president, his widow Colette left the painting to her sister, who has since died. Remained anonymous, the last legatee of the work would be a friend of said sister of Madame Senghor.
After having been estimated at a sum of “800,000 to one million euros” and put on sale at a starting price of 600,000 euros, the painting was sold for 1.21 million euros – or 1.48 million with the costs – to a European buyer who positioned himself by telephone. There were a total of seven bidders, notably from Switzerland and Germany.
Did Senghor see in the dominant shade of the work an allegory of his negritude? He who compared the effect of this oil on abstract canvas to the emotion provoked by the sight of a dan mask, was he reading a totem capable of evoking African sculpture? Still, the poet was in love with all the Francophonies, French as well as others, and that the painting was enthroned in his office, in his host Norman city, Verson, where he lived from the 1980s. And that no one denies the influence of African art on European art of the twentieth century, especially on the works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne.
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