PIERRE SOULAGES
Rodez (France), 1919- Nimes (France), 2022
Although he was accepted at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1939, it was at the school in Montpellier, where he was posted during the war, that he developed his training as an artist. The colour and figuration of those early years disappeared in the period immediately after the war. The Celtic engravings and Romanesque architecture of his native region and the work of Rembrandt and Poussin became the references for an abstract aesthetics based on the mastery of black, which he expressed in the experiments that he carried out in 1947 with walnut-juice and paper and tar on glass. He showed this work in the Salon des Surindépendants, an exhibition of French abstract art that travelled around Germany in 1948, and in his first solo exhibition, held at the Galerie Lydia Conti in Paris in 1949. A year later he and Franz Kline were included in the series Young Painters in US & France at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. This was the first step towards international recognition, which was completed by his participation in the Bienal de São Paulo in 1953 and his first solo exhibition in America, at the Kootz Gallery in 1954. During the latter part of the fifties he developed a procedure of his own for his etchings. On his canvases he used more vehement strokes and incorporated reds, blues and ochres. These characteristics, combined with the technique of raclage, used during an initial period until 1963, enabled him to nuance his interplays of light and shade by means of transparencies. His first retrospective was held at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover in 1960, subsequently travelling in Europe and Mexico. The sixties ended with a major exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris (1966) and a considerable presence in collections and museums in the United States. This contrasted with the rejection shown by the critics, strongly influenced by the aesthetics of Minimal Art. He developed a more decorative style in which there was a return of colour and raclage, after being abandoned for several years, and he continued to use this style –with the exception of a period in 1972-74 when he only did drawings and lithographs- until the end of the seventies. In 1979, coinciding with an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, he began to paint his chromatically polyvalent monopigmented paintings, black monochromes on large formats or directly arranged as polyptichs. In the nineties he modified the monochrome quality of his work and concluded one of his most ambitious projects: 104 stained-glass windows for the Abbey of Conques. He died on 25/10/2022 in Nimes, France.