Supports/Surfaces Movement: Folded, Crumpled, Unstretched

The Supports/Surfaces movement was a group of French artists who, around 1969-1972, took painting to pieces to see what it was made of. They showed stretchers without canvas and canvas without stretchers. They folded, knotted, dyed, stamped and crumpled cloth, laid it on the floor and hung it like washing. For anyone interested in froissage, the group matters because crumpling and folding were among its main tools, used not to find hidden images but to let the material itself make the picture.

Where the group came from

French Wikipedia describes the artists as coming largely from the art schools of Montpellier and Paris, with most of them rooted in the south of France. It credits Vincent Bioulès, born in Montpellier in 1938, as the founding member who devised the name. The group is usually counted as twelve painters and sculptors: Vincent Bioulès, Louis Cane, Marc Devade, Daniel Dezeuze, Noël Dolla, Toni Grand, Bernard Pagès, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Patrick Saytour, André Valensi, Claude Viallat and André-Pierre Arnal. Lists vary slightly, and other artists worked alongside the group without formally belonging to it.

The key exhibitions

The group grew out of a series of exhibitions in 1969. An exhibition called Peinture en question was held at the École spéciale d’architecture in Paris in March-April 1969. In June 1969 an exhibition at the museum in Le Havre, La peinture en question, carried a catalogue statement by Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, Patrick Saytour and Claude Viallat. Its argument, in summary: the subject of painting is painting itself; the works point to nothing beyond themselves, not to the artist’s biography or to art history, and the aim is simply to lay bare the elements that make up a painting.

The first exhibition under the name Supports/Surfaces was held at the ARC, the contemporary art department of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, with Bioulès, Devade, Dezeuze, Saytour, Valensi and Viallat. Sources give its date as 1969 or 1970, so check a museum chronology if you need the exact year.

Taking painting apart

The name says it all: the support (stretcher, canvas, any surface that carries paint) and the surface (the painted skin). Claude Viallat later summed up the early work in a famous line, reported on French Wikipedia: Dezeuze painted stretchers without canvas, Viallat painted canvases without stretchers, and Saytour painted the image of the stretcher onto the canvas.

The methods were physical and often repetitive:

• Unstretched cloth. Viallat used tarpaulins, parasols, scraps of fabric and knotted or plaited rope, stamping the same simple shape again and again.
• Bare stretchers. Dezeuze separated the canvas from its frame and showed the wooden structure on its own.
• Folding and crumpling. Saytour revisited the pliage (folding) technique, and Arnal crumpled and folded canvases before spraying them with paint.
• Rope and wood. Bernard Pagès and Toni Grand worked with wood and cord, closer to sculpture.
• Craft dyes and stamps. Cane used stamps; Viallat applied colour with stencils; several members used dyes made for crafts rather than artists’ paint.

French Wikipedia relates these practices to a wish to return to basic gestures, and compares them with the Japanese Gutai group (from 1955), American Minimalism and Italian Arte Povera, which asked similar questions in the same years.

Hantaï’s folds

The most important single influence was Simon Hantaï. From the early 1960s he crumpled and folded canvas, painted it while folded, and opened it to reveal patches of colour and bare cloth. The Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, describing Arnal’s 1968 Froissage, names Hantaï’s crumpling and folding method as a strong influence on Arnal and the Supports/Surfaces artists. Our page on Simon Hantaï’s pliage explains the method.

Politics and the split

The group combined studio experiment with theory and politics. Members wrote in the journal Peinture-Cahiers théoriques, debating painting in theoretical and political terms. Those debates also divided them. French Wikipedia dates the split to 1972. After that each artist went their own way, some towards figurative painting, some towards expressive abstraction.

Legacy

Supports/Surfaces is now seen as one of the founding groups of contemporary French art. French Wikipedia notes that the Centre Pompidou has given the group a dedicated room in its modern collection since 2001. English Wikipedia mentions a 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and notes that Viallat and Toni Grand later represented France at the Venice Biennale.

The group’s works are still in copyright, so we do not reproduce them. Museum catalogues, especially the Centre Pompidou’s, are the best place to see images and check dates.

Supports/Surfaces and froissage

Paper froissage, as practised by Ladislav Novák, uses the creases of a crumpled sheet as a starting point for a drawing: the artist looks into the accidental lines and finds a figure. Supports/Surfaces did something different with the same gesture. Crumpling and folding were used to decide where paint would and would not land, and the result was left abstract. There is no hidden figure; the subject is the crease and the cloth.

The two approaches share one idea that runs through this whole site: give up some control at the start, and let the material produce forms you could not have planned. That is the thread that connects them to chance in art more widely, from Arp’s torn-paper collages to Ellsworth Kelly’s chance collages.

Try a Supports/Surfaces exercise

1. Take a piece of old cotton sheet or calico, about 50 cm square. Do not stretch it.
2. Fold it in half twice, or crumple it loosely, and tie it with string.
3. Dip one corner in diluted acrylic or fabric dye, or dab colour on the outside only.
4. Let it dry before opening it, then hang it from a nail by one corner.
5. Make a second piece with folds instead of crumples and compare the patterns.

For paper versions suited to a classroom, see crumpled paper art ideas and froissage with acrylic paint.