The French abstract painter Pierre Soulages died yesterday aged 102.
Best known for his obsession with black in his work – or what he called outrenoir or “beyond black” – Londoners are most likely to know Soulages from his paintings at the Tate Modern, although the artist’s work has been shown at galleries around the world, including the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Rio De Janiro’s Museum of Modern Art.
In a statement yesterday French President Emmanuel Macron said: “Beyond the dark, his works are vivid metaphors from which each of us draws hope.” In 2014, the French President at the time, François Hollande, described Soulages as, “the world’s greatest living artist.”
Pierre Soulages avait su réinventer le noir, en y faisant jaillir la lumière. Par-delà le noir, ses œuvres sont des métaphores vives où chacun de nous puise l’espoir. pic.twitter.com/4dxiCXCYy6
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) October 26, 2022
Born in 1919, in Rodez, a small city in the South of France, Soulages went to Paris in the late Thirties where he learnt from artist René Jaudon. He never took up his place at the esteemed École Nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, however, and instead returned home to focus on painting.
After the war, where Soulages had been called up for military service, Soulages moved back to Paris and was dedicated to building a career for himself as an artist. He was successful – gaining the most recognition in the US. His first exhibition was in Paris in 1947 at the Salon des Indépendants, two years later he showed his work at the Betty Parsons gallery in New York, and in 1953 he was part of the Younger European Painters exhibition at the Guggenheim.
His work was snapped up by American art dealers, and Soulanges enjoyed several decades of American success – thanks in particular to art dealer Samuel M. Kootz. When Kootz’s gallery closed in 1966, and pop art came into vogue, Soulages lost some of his American momentum – although his career continued to flourish throughout the rest of the world.
He was involved in some remarkable projects: Between 1987 to 1994 he created 104 stained glass windows for an Abbey in Conques – a commune in the same region (Aveyron) where he had grown up. The project consumed so much time and energy that Soulages apparently stopped working on other paintings.
His first outrenoir paintings were shown at the Centre Pompidou in 1979 (although black had been a key element of all of his work for some time. He told The New York Times in 2014, “Black has been fundamental for me since childhood.”) In 2001 he reportedly became the first living artist to show his work at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
The artist also has had retrospectives at both the Centre Pompidou in 2009 (and, according to The Guardian, it was the museum’s largest retrospective of a living artist at the time) and at both the Louvre and Lévy Gorvy Gallery in New York in 2019, to mark his 100th birthday.
Arguably France’s most financially successful artist until his death, his paintings would each fetch several million dollars. According to The New York Times, the auction price for his paintings skyrocketed by more than 500 per cent between 2003 and 2014.
Emilio Steinberger, senior director at the Lévy Gorvy Gallery in New York, explained to The New York Times in 2019: “He’s history and he’s contemporary at the same time.
“He was friends with Giacometti and Rothko; he started when Pollock just started pouring paintings. You’re talking to someone who was at the centre of history in Paris and in New York and at the moment is still a very contemporary artist. There’s almost nobody else like that.”
Soulages is survived by his wife, Colette, 101, whom he married in 1942.
