Pierre Soulages

Pierre Soulages (born December 24, 1919, Rodez, France—died October 26, 2022, Sète, France) was a French painter and printmaker and a major figure in the postwar abstract movement. He was a leader of Tachism, the French counterpart to Action painting in the United States, and was known for the restraint of his works and his preoccupation with the colour black.

During his childhood in Rodez, France, Soulages was fascinated by the Celtic carvings in a local museum, prehistoric cave art, and the Romanesque architecture and sculpture of Sainte-Foy church at Conques. In 1938 he went to Paris to study art. There he saw exhibits featuring Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne and visited the Louvre. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, but he soon left Paris, frustrated by the school’s traditional approach. Back in Rodez he continued to paint, especially trees in winter, with their bare black branches against the sky. In 1941 he fought briefly in World War II, though he was demobilized soon after being called up. He then attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier but spent most of the war clandestinely working on a vineyard to avoid being sent to a forced labour camp during the German occupation. Although he was unable to paint during that period, he was introduced to abstract art by Russian painter, illustrator, and designer Sonia Delaunay, whom he met about 1943.

In 1946 he moved to Courbevoie, outside Paris. There he set up a studio and began producing abstract works, characterized by their heavy black brush strokes. He befriended other artists—including Hans Hartung, Francis Picabia, and Fernand Léger—and had his first exhibition at the Salon des Surindépendants in 1947. His first solo exhibition was two years later at the Galerie Lydia Conti in Paris. During that period Soulages also designed sets and costumes for Roger Vailland’s play Héloïse et Abélard (1949), for Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1951), and for ballets. As his reputation expanded and he gained representation (1954–66) with New York dealer Samuel Kootz, major American museums began purchasing his paintings, beginning with the Phillips Collection in 1951 and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1952. His painting style shifted subtly over his long career, becoming looser and more gestural in the 1950s and focusing almost entirely on the texture and brushwork of black oil paint on large canvases in his works after 1979, works he called outrenoir, literally “beyond black.”

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From 1987 to 1994 Soulages designed more than 100 contemporary stained-glass windows for his much-loved Sainte-Foy church. He avoided polychromatic glass and elaborate narratives or decorations, using white translucent glass that he designed and simple lead fittings to maintain the purity of the natural light. The windows were installed at Sainte-Foy in 1994 and remained on permanent display.

Soulages’s painting style remained distinctive throughout his career. His nearly exclusive use of black set his work apart from other French abstract painting in the postwar period. His early paintings, with their large gestural strokes, are often compared to those of the American Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline, but the relationship between Soulages and Abstract Expressionism is only superficial. Despite the spontaneous appearance of Soulages’s works—most of which are entitled Painting—they are the product of careful deliberation, experimentation in texture, and a search for formal balance.

In 1979 Soulages was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Japan Art Association awarded him the Praemium Imperiale for lifetime achievement in painting in 1992. In addition to receiving those awards, in 2001 he became the first living artist honoured with an exhibit at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. In the 21st century, more than eight decades into his career, Soulages continued to make art and to have major exhibitions of his work at museums and galleries throughout Europe and the United States. The Soulages Museum, which houses the bulk of the artist’s oeuvre and features exhibitions of work by contemporary artists, opened in Rodez in 2014. To mark Soulages’s 100th birthday in 2019, the Louvre fêted him with a solo exhibition. He was the third living artist—after Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall—to be so honoured.