Remembering Pierre Soulages (1919-2022), a pioneer of post-war abstraction

Trailblazing French painter, printmaker, and sculptor Pierre Soulages has died aged 102. He was a key proponent of artwork informel and summary expressionism, and, most famously, a grasp of the color black. 

Referred to as ‘the painter of black and lightweight’, Soulages was born in Rodez, a small city within the south of France, in 1919. His enthusiasm for portray could be traced again to his childhood. throughout which he drew inspiration from the prehistoric standing stones discovered close to his hometown, and painted black winter bushes on a darkish background, the latter forming the premise of his portray apply for many years to come back. 

After a brief keep in Paris in 1938, the artist spent the occupation working as a wine producer in central France. He relocated completely to the French capital in 1946, settling in a small studio and devoting himself to portray. His early work was dynamic and summary, conceived by making use of darkish colors in broad bar-like brushstrokes to immaculate white canvases. Though his work had been intently aligned with summary expressionism, Soulages at all times rejected the bounds of lyrical abstraction: ‘Portray will not be the equal of a sensation, an emotion, or a sense; it’s the organisation of colored kinds, on which is made and unmade a which means that we impose on it’, he would later say.

The postwar years had been vital in Soulages’ profession.  After exhibiting his work on the Salon des Surindépendents in 1947, he was featured within the Grosse Ausstellung Französische Abstrakte Malerei, a serious travelling exhibition of summary artwork held in Stuttgart, and caught the eye of James Johnson Sweeney, the long run director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This encounter led to his first solo present at Galerie Lydia Conti quickly after.  On the time, Soulages’ work was usually perceived as a French counterpart to that of the New York faculty of artists, particularly the work of Franz Kline. Over the course of the Sixties, Soulages gained publicity and acclaim throughout each Europe and America, and was celebrated in a variety of main retrospectives. 

In 1979, Soulages started a physique of labor titled Outrenoir (‘past black’)  which might go on to outline his profession. On this monochrome collection, he would apply black acrylic in thick layers on canvas, earlier than carving stripes and streaks into it. This system created a floor by which easy, glassy blocks of black met the roughness of uncooked canvas – his work had been landscapes of sunshine, form, reflection and notion. Soulages’ experimental method used instruments of his personal manufacturing in addition to home utensils; he was pushed by the will to assume outdoors the field, always on the hunt for innovation.

In 2019, to mark the artist’s one hundredth birthday, the Louvre Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, and Perrotin gallery’s Shanghai location all organised exhibitions to honour his work. The gallery moreover printed a monograph on the artist’s Outrenoir collection. 

As Emmanuel Perrotin, who started collaborating with the artist in 2017, mentioned in an announcement: ‘I’ll at all times bear in mind our first assembly in 2012 in the home in Sète, with Colette: I met a very dynamic couple there. They each instantly fascinated me with their reminiscence and their vitality.’ Perrotin described Soulages as  ‘an excellent artist in fact, but additionally an excellent soul, beneficiant and pleasant, an excellent determine of each twentieth and 21th centuries and an excellent buddy, who will stay in my coronary heart and in that of the gallery groups. My ideas exit to Colette and their workforce in Sète. We are going to all miss him dearly.’

Soulages was granted the Grand Prix Nationwide de Peinture in 1986. The next 12 months, he obtained an formidable fee from the French state to design 104 stained-glass home windows for the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy, situated close to his hometown of Rodez, a challenge that might take eight years to finish.

Identified for a sensational potential to subtly depict the unseen, Pierre Soulages has gained worldwide recognition as a key determine in each summary expressionism and artwork informel. By turning black into an incandescent color, the artist put the highlight on the origins of humanity in its darkness and lightweight.