Pierre Soulages

Pierre Soulages, known as the painter of "black and light," was born on December 24, 1919, in Rodez, in the South of France. During his childhood, he developed a fascination with Celtic carvings, prehistoric cave art, and Romanesque architecture and sculpture, influences that would resurface throughout his career.

At 18 years old, he moved to Paris to prepare for the professorship of drawing and the entrance competition to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Although he was admitted in 1938, he refused to enter, quickly returning to Rodez. However, during his brief stay in Paris, Pierre Soulages visited the Musée du Louvre and saw exhibitions of Cézanne and Picasso, which had a profound impact on him.

Drafted in 1940, he was demobilised in 1941. While Paris was under occupation, he went to Montpellier and frequented the Musée Fabre. When Montpellier was later occupied, he entered a period of clandestinity to escape the Compulsory Work Service (STO) and stopped painting. From 1941 to 1942, Pierre Soulages prepared for a professorship in drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier. There, he met his future wife, Colette, whom he married in 1942. Throughout their life, the couple travelled to various cities worldwide, including New York, Hong Kong, New Delhi, and San Francisco and became close friends with Claude Pompidou, the wife of French President Georges Pompidou.

Soulages was able to fully concentrate on painting only in 1946 when he moved to the Parisian suburbs. His abstract and dark canvases, where black dominates, were quickly noticed as they differed from the colourful, semi-figurative painting of the post-war period. He found a studio in Paris, near Montparnasse, and participated in exhibitions in Paris and Europe. He experimented with a range of materials and techniques, such as gouache, engraving, oil, and acrylic paint, across different mediums like paper, canvas, and panel. However, his first groundbreaking work was the Broux de noix series, translating to Walnut Stains, (1947–1959), made using walnut stain commonly reserved for furniture rather than paint.

These paintings attracted attention not only for their use of an unconventional and inexpensive material but also for the bold and restrained energy embedded in them. Black progressively conquered the surface of Soulages's calligraphic abstract paintings, which also incorporated subtle hints of colour, mainly ochre and blue. This instantly recognisable visual language of this series aided him in getting into different art galleries and Museums in Europe and the United States of America such as Galerie Berggruen and Galerie Lydia Conti in Paris, France to the Kootz Gallery in New York, USA, Gimpel Fils Gallery in London, UK.

His aesthetics radically shifted toward monochrome in 1979, when he initiated his lifelong series Outrenoir. Literally translating as "beyond black," Outrenoir opened onto a new realm that transcended purely gestural and monochromatic abstraction. Systematically applied in thick layers on canvas, black paint was meticulously scraped, striated, and overall sculpted to create smooth or rough areas that reflect light in various ways. By masterfully turning black into a luminous colour, Soulages powerfully evoked the genesis of the world, which came out of darkness.

By the early 50s, his works were acquired by prestigious institutions including the Phillips Gallery in Washington, the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro.

For more than seven decades, Soulages was exhibited internationally and regularly. He was honoured with two retrospectives in France, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1996, and at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in 2009. In 2001, he was the first living artist to be given a full-scale survey at the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, and in 2014, the Musée Soulages opened in the artist's hometown of Rodez, housing five hundred paintings spanning Soulages's career.

In 2019, numerous events were organised in France and abroad in homage to the artist for his 100th birthday, along with numerous bookstore editions, radio and television broadcasts. Opera Gallery Paris organised the exhibition ‘Pierre Soulages - Beyond Black’ at this occasion. The celebration continued with a hanging at the Musée national d'Art moderne of the Pompidou Center in Paris, the ‘Soulages’ exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in the Salon Carré of the Denon wing, designed as a small retrospective, was the opportunity to present three new paintings dating from August to October 2019.

Pierre Soulages passed away on October 25, 2022, at the age of 102 and was buried on November 4, at the Montparnasse cemetery and a national tribute was held at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, on November 2, 2022.

Today, Soulages's work is represented in over 110 museums across all continents with more than 230 paintings. More than 150 of his paintings are in public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, USA; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA; Tate Modern, London, UK; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA.