Biographie

1919-

Pierre Soulages was born in 1919, in the small city of Rodez in South West France.
Aged nine­teen, he left for Paris in 1938 to take the cours­es of the painter and lith­o­g­ra­ph­er René Jaudon. The fol­low­ing year, he entered the ‘École des Beaux Arts’ whose pro­gram he found too aca­d­e­m­ic; Soulages pre­ferred to dis­cov­er the mas­ter­pieces on view at the Lou­vre muse­um and the avant-garde art shows at the Paul Rosen­berg gallery.

After the Sec­ond World War, Soulages set­tled on the out­skirts of Paris, where he con­cen­trat­ed on abstract forms ren­dered in dark colours on can­vas or on paper, drawn with char­coal or wal­nut ink. He first exhib­it­ed in Paris at the 1947 edi­tion of the ‘Salon des Surindépen­dants’ and at the 1948 edi­tion of the ‘Salon des Réal­ités Nou­velles’ before going inter­na­tion­al in Munich in 1949, and in New-York at the Bet­ty Par­sons Gallery who showed him along­side Hans Har­tung. Soulages’ first one-man show was held in 1949 in Paris at the Lydia Con­ti gallery. Soon, Soulages gained crit­i­cal and pub­lic acclaim as a major rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Mod­ern Art and a leader of Euro­pean Post-War Abstraction.
Soulages’ Abstrac­tion ques­tions the rela­tion between mat­ter, colour and form as it appears in the act of paint­ing. Dur­ing the ear­ly 1950s, Soulages exhib­it­ed in New York, at the Guggen­heim and at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art; in Lon­don at the Tate; in Paris at the ‘Musée d’Art Mod­erne de Paris’. He had a first one-man show in New York in 1954.
Soulages met and befriend­ed Mark Rothko dur­ing his first transat­lantic trip to the Unit­ed States in 1957.

The exten­sive oeu­vre of Soulages can be divid­ed into sev­er­al periods.
Dur­ing 1946–1979, Soulages pro­duced cyclic series of work which adhered to his trade-mark form of explo­ration, push­ing the tech­ni­cal bound­aries to the lim­it. These series start­ed with the so-called ‘Signs’, dark shapes against light back­grounds dat­ing 1946–1949. Dur­ing 1949–1956, these ‘sign-forms’ appeared arranged in ver­ti­cal or hor­i­zon­tal rhythms against coloured non-uni­form back­grounds. Dur­ing 1956–1963, Soulages cov­ered his can­vass­es with colour before apply­ing a thick lay­er of black which he then scraped off in places in order to reveal the colour under­neath. Dur­ing 1963–1971, Soulages dropped colour in favour of black and white applied on a large scale. Dur­ing 1972–1978, Soulages returned to work­ing on paper using the tech­niques of etch­ing, lith­o­g­ra­phy and serig­ra­phy. In 1979, Soulages dis­cov­ered the par­tic­u­lar rela­tion­ship which the colour black enter­tains with light. Sub­se­quent­ly, Soulages focussed on his research into the colour black which he famous­ly labelled ‘out­renoir’ and ‘noir-lumière’.
As of 1979, his paint­ings became the por­tray­al of the reflec­tion of the light against the dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions of the colour black. Dur­ing the 1980s Soulages pro­duced many polyp­tychs which dis­played an inter­est­ing vari­ety of sur­face work in the colour black, the cho­sen for­mats and for­mal structures.

In 1990, Soulages defined his ‘out­renoir’ as ‘being beyond black, a reflect­ed light, trans­mut­ed by black. Out­renoir as black which ceas­es to be and becomes the source of clar­i­ty, of secret light. Out­renoir: anoth­er men­tal dimen­sion than sim­ply black.’
In 2009, the Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou host­ed at the occa­sion of the artist’s nineti­eth birth­day the largest ret­ro­spec­tive ever ded­i­cat­ed to a liv­ing artist. In 2014, the Pierre Soulages Muse­um was inau­gu­rat­ed in his birth city of Rodez.
Soulages is a French liv­ing legend.