Pierre Jean Louis Germain Soulages (French: [sulaʒ]; Occitan: Pèire Solatges; 24 December 1919 – 25 October 2022) was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. In 2014, President François Hollande of France described him as "the world's greatest living artist." His works are held by leading museums of the world, and there is a museum dedicated to his art in his hometown of Rodez. Soulages is known as "the painter of black", owing to his interest in the colour "both as a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens a mental field all its own." He saw light as a work material; striations of the black surface of his paintings enable him to reflect light, allowing the black to come out of darkness and into brightness, thus becoming a luminous colour. Soulages produced 104 stained-glass windows for the Romanesque architecture of the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques from 1987 to 1994. He received international awards, and the Louvre in Paris held a retrospective of his works on the occasion of his centenary.
Early life and family Soulages was born in Rodez, Aveyron, on 24 December 1919. His father, Amans, was a carriage maker who ran a hunting and fishing shop. He died when Pierre was age five. Pierre was raised by his older sister Antoinette and their mother, Aglaé Zoé Julie (Corp) Soulages. As a child, he was interested in the area's menhirs, in Celtic carvings in the local museum, and also in the Romanesque architecture of the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques. He dressed in all black, and his mother disliked it.
Early career Inspired by the art of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, Soulages began studies at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, but soon dropped out because he was disappointed by the traditional style. After wartime military service, he studied further at the Fine Arts School of Montpellier. He opened a studio in Courbevoie, Paris, painting in "complete abstraction", with black as the dominant colour, and experimenting with walnut oil. His first exhibition was at the Salon des Indépendants in 1947. He also worked as a designer of stage sets. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and in New York City the same year, gaining recognition in the United States. Betty Parsons Gallery showed his work in New York in 1949. In 1950, Leo Castelli organized an exhibition at Sidney Janis. In 1954 Soulages began showing at Samuel Kootz. His works were included in the two major exhibitions of European artists, Younger European Painters at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (1953) and The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors at the Museum of Modern Art (1955) in New York. In 1979, Soulages was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Later career From 1987 to 1994, he produced 104 stained-glass windows for the Abbey of Sainte-Foy in Conques, prepared by around 700 tests at a small factory near Münster, Germany. A gallerist reflected on the windows in the context of his paintings:
He studied the way that light wouldn't cross through the stained glass, but would be fractionally fragmented, exploded through the stained glass. So when you are in Conques and you see the light coming through these stained-glass panels, how the light hits the glass and then comes in and the harmonious explosion inside the church, it's beyond religious. And that's what he was trying to achieve with his black paintings, to capture whatever you give them, but they're reflected in a completely independent way. It puts you in front of the void, in front of fullness and emptiness, in front of strength and vulnerability. It has this tension, and that is what it was to know Soulages. Soulages was the first living artist to have been invited to exhibit at the state Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg and later with the Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow (2001). In 2007, the Musée Fabre of Montpellier devoted an entire room to Soulages, presenting a donation he made to the city. It included twenty paintings dating from 1951 to 2006, among which were major works from the 1960s, two large "plus-black" works from the 1970s, and several large polyptychs. A retrospective was held at the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou from October 2009 to March 2010. In 2010, the Museum of Mexico City presented a retrospective of paintings that also included an interview-video with the artist. In 2014, the Musée Soulages opened in Soulages' hometown of Rodez, as a place to permanently display his works and to house temporary contemporary exhibitions. Soulages and his wife donated 900 works. The paintings represent all stages of his work, from post-war oils to a phase of work he calls Outrenoir. It was the most complete display of work from his first 30 years. Some space in the museum is always reserved for exhibitions of other contemporary artists, as Soulages had wanted from the beginning. In 2014, Soulages presented fourteen recent works in his first American exhibition in 10 years, at Dominique Lévy and Galerie Perrotin, New York. In September 2019, the Lévy Gorvy Gallery in New York held a major exhibition ahead of the retrospective at the Louvre Museum in December celebrating his 100th birthday. On 17 November 2021, his Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 4 août 1961, was auctioned for $20.2M, an auction record for the artist.
Artistic practice
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