In the year 2019 Pierre Soulages was able to celebrate his centenary finding himself in a position to continue painting and trying to increase and renew his already outstanding contribution to the history of art, and especially to that of abstract painting. On December 24 he would have been 103 years old.
When I think of the work of Soulages I cannot avoid a certain feeling of injustice. It is evident that, after the Second World War, New York took over from Paris as the main artistic capital, at least in terms of contemporary and avant-garde art. But this does not mean that European artists were less creative after the war than Americans, or Europeans who emigrated to the United States. And yet, history books and exhibition catalogs abound with great praise for the originality of abstract expressionism made in the USA, accompanied by a blatant dismissal of the contributions made in Europe in those same years, or earlier. For example, it has been too often claimed that Soulages’s painting resembles that of Franz Kline, when the exact opposite is true, for Soulages’s thick, dark-lined compositions date from 1946 and 1947, prior to Kline’s. . Which resemble those of Soulages.
The French painter was, however, a consecrated and well-known artist in his country, especially after the retrospective at the Center Pompidou (2009) and the inauguration of the Soulages Museum in Rodez, on May 30, 2014. The splendid building of the The museum is a project by the Catalan studio RCR Arquitectes (Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta).
Pierre Soulages was twelve years old when he visited Sainte-Foy de Conques. Discovering Romanesque architecture made him the future artist that he became a few years later. “I was in a state of exaltation, and I told myself that in life there is only one important thing: it is art.”
Around 1942, at the height of the world war, he discovered modern art thanks to a denigrating report on degenerate art published by the Nazi magazine Signal. Soulages liked those alleged degenerates called Piet Mondrian, Max Ernst, etc. And another inspiring element was poetry: that of Guillaume IX d’Aquitaine, but also the contemporary poetry of Paul Valéry, René Char and others.
His predilection for the color –or no color– black is notorious. Even when he was very young he tried to dress in black, and his mother was outraged. She told him: “Do you want to wear mourning for me now?”
Just after the war, in 1946 and 1947, he began to paint with walnut, a material used in carpentry, to stain wood. They were thick dark brushstrokes, rich in somber and translucent nuances, which made up abstract constructions, meaningless signs. Other abstractions came later. Splendid polyptychs, since 1967. And gloomy paintings, which reflected a rare light. Ultra-black, he used to say, inventing a neologism. They were paintings like sheet music, ironed, with groove rhythms. Soulages had a good influence on painters like Gerhard Richter and Joaquim Chancho. He used to say: “I have two birthplaces: Rodez and contemporary painting”.
