Painter Pierre Soulages was the master of the color black. (Aventurier Patrick/ABACA/picture alliance)Pierre Soulages, the French abstract artist best known for painting most of his works in black, died on Tuesday at the age of 102.
The museum dedicated to his life and work in his southwestern hometown of Rodez made the announcement on Wednesday.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to the artist saying: “Pierre Soulages was able to reinvent black by revealing the light. Beyond the dark, his works are vivid metaphors from which each of us draws hope.”
Soulages’s paintings hung in more than 110 museums around the world and he could command seven-figure sums for them.
His 1960 canvas of thick black stripes sold at auction at the Louvre for $10.5 million in 2019.
Paint it black
Born in Rodez in southern France in 1929, he belonged to a generation of artists who reinvented abstract painting in Europe after the Second World War. When French hero and president Charles de Gaulle called French painting “sick,” Soulages countered that it was not sick but under “attack” and this his role was to defend it.
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Since his first exhibition in 1947, when he was 27 years old, Soulages has used the color black.
“I love the authority of black, its severity, its obviousness, its radicalism,” the tall painter, who was himself always clad in black, declared to the French news agency AFP in 2019. He also told the French-German TV channel ARTE, “I do not paint with black but instead with the light.”
Many of his works did not have titles but are named after the technique used, dimensions, and the date of execution.
His art involved scraping, digging, and etching thick layers of paint with rubber, spoons or tiny rakes to create different textures that absorb or reject light, taking him to what he called a “different country” from plain black.
His legacy included producing from 1987 to 1994 some 104 stained-glass windows for the Romanesque Sainte-Foy de Conques abbey.
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In 1955, he took part in the first documenta art fair in the central German city of Kassel. The event has since become one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art events.
Exhibition at the Louvre
For his 100th birthday in December 2019, he was honored by the Louvre in Paris with a solo exhibition.
He was only the third artist to have a solo show at the museum during his lifetime, joining Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso.
At the time Soulages told French newspaper La Depeche du Midi: “Je me fous de ma mort, tant que mes toiles vivent.” In other words, he doesn’t care about dying, as long as his paintings live on.
He is survived by his wife Colette, who is 101.
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