Farewell to Pierre Soulages, the French painter of the ultramarine

French painter Pierre Soulages, known for his experiments with the color black, passed away yesterday at the age of 102. Breaking the news was the municipality of Rodez, where the artist was born and where he lived, and where the Musée Soulages dedicated to him is also located. He had just celebrated 80 years of marriage to his wife Colette Llaurens, born in 1921 and married on October 24, 1942.

Born in 1919, he had studied painting privately with René Jaudon and then enrolled in 1939 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was, however, more interested in museums than in academic life. In 1941 he moved to Montpellier and attended the city’s academy of fine arts, continuing to paint and making his debut in 1946 in Paris, where he had meanwhile returned, at the Salon des Indépendants. His art, associated with the Informal current, soon began to be concerned with experiments with black, considered by Soulages as a “color and a non-color. When light reflects on black, it transforms it. It opens up a mental field of its own.”

Achieving success in the 1950s, Soulages exhibited his work at the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York (in 1953 and 1955, respectively), and then went on to star in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe and America. In 1979 his painting experienced a breakthrough withOutrenoir: while working on a canvas, the artist was constantly adding and removing a black patina to achieve a surface that could reflect light that was in turn modified by the blackness of the painting. This was the “otherworldliness” for Soulages, or, in his own words, the “blackness that ceases to be such and consequently becomes capable of emitting clarity, secret light.” His painting underwent a further evolution in 2004 when he abandoned oil painting, a medium he had always used, in favor of acrylic. In the meantime, he had also received several public commissions, including the stained-glass windows of Sainte-Foye de Conques Abbey, inaugurated in 1994.

Among the awards Soulages received were the 1976 Rembrandt Prize, the Grand Prix National de Peinture in 1986, and above all the Praemium Imperiale, the oscar of art, obtained in 1992 in the Painting category. In 2015 he had been awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. His works are held in numerous museums in France and around the world, including the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, the Tate in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In Italy it is possible to admire Soulages at the GAM in Turin. The museum dedicated to him, the Musée Soulages in Rodez, houses the world’s largest collection of his works and opened its doors in 2014 (it was the artist himself who laid the foundation stone of the building in a ceremony held in 2010).

Farewell to Pierre Soulages, the French painter of the ultramarine

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