(Paris) The “painter of black and light”, the Frenchman Pierre Soulages, a major figure in post-war abstraction, has died, announced the Soulages museum in his hometown of Rodez. He was 102 years old.
Posted at 1:06 p.m.
Pierre Soulages has become very influential for his paintings where black dominates. He called it “black-light” or “outrenoir”.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to him, posting a photo of him with the artist on Twitter. “Pierre Soulages knew how to reinvent black, by bringing light to it. Beyond the black, his works are vivid metaphors from which each of us draws hope,” he wrote.
A major Soulages retrospective at the Louvre in the year of his 100th birthday took place in 2019, in which the museum called him a “major figure in non-figurative painting”.
Soulages’ early black-brown paintings in walnut stain led to the works that defined his life: his “outrenoir” paintings. These are almost always pure black, with paint pressed onto huge canvases, then scraped with knives and stroked with brushes to an almost sculptural degree.
Soulages discovered the technique in 1979 while working on a painting he considered a failure. Then he realized that paint was reflective, that light comes from color which is the absence of light. The reflection of the viewers and the changing daylight are part of the art, which he says creates a new mental space.
Pierre Jean Louis Germain Soulages was born in Rodez, in the Occitanie region, in the south of France in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War, growing up with a fascination for old stones, landscapes and craftsmanship.
His beginnings in painting in 1936 and 1937 gave him the ambition to work in Paris. During a visit to Montpellier at this time, he met his future wife, Colette Llaurens, who would stay with him for the rest of his life.
In 1943, Soulages made an important encounter with the artist Sonia Delaunay who introduced him to abstract art. However, it was not until the end of the Second World War, during which he served, that the young painter was able to open his first studio in the French capital, and held his first exhibition in 1947.
It has continued to gain international recognition, particularly in the United States after the war.
Soulages’ works were featured in major American exhibitions of the 1950s, notably at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1955.
In his native France, he was considered a national treasure.
His legacy includes the making from 1987 to 1994 of some 104 stained glass windows for the Romanesque Sainte-Foy Abbey in Conques — a site he visited as a child, which he has referred to in interviews as a defining moment in his life.
During a retrospective at the Center Pompidou in Paris in 2009, Soulages said he couldn’t pinpoint when he fell in love with black. He said it had been an eternity, launching into an ode emphasizing that black is anarchy, revolt, mourning, but also there to celebrate.
Soulages, whom the Center Pompidou described as “the greatest painter of the current French scene”, was prolific until the end of his life. Over the decades he has had retrospectives all over the world, from Houston, USA, to Seoul, South Korea. In 2001, he became the first living painter to be exhibited at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
The Soulages Museum was opened in his hometown of Rodez in southern France in 2014.
The painter had a sharp mind and lived in the present. Asked about his work, he once joked with the Associated Press: “It’s hard, I almost want to talk to you about what I’ll be doing tomorrow. »