Is black even a color? This is controversial, but for the French painter Pierre Soulages it is the first color in art history. He dedicated most of his artistic work to her. Now he dies at the age of 102.
Sometimes they are matt, sometimes shiny – and the wide stripes on the non-representational works are almost always black. The French painter Pierre Soulages has been exploring the color black for more than 60 years. Now the artist, who is one of the most influential abstract painters of the 20th century, has died at the age of 102.
Soulages became known early on for his minimalist, gestural paintings in black. In 1948 his compositions were shown in the first exhibition of French painters in Germany. Solo exhibitions in galleries in Paris, Munich and New York followed. In 1955 he took part in the first documenta in Kassel, and his first retrospectives in international museums took place in the 1960s.
The first abstract compositions were created in the mid-1940s. These are depictions in which he created sweeping, broad black-brownish lines with nut stain, a material used to spice up old furniture. In these works, Soulages still used the color black to express the light effect of white and other colors.
That was to change in 1979. He began to completely cover the canvas with black, using the color to reflect the light. Oversized triptychs and polyptychs were created in which the structure of the black color paste modulates the light. He called these compositions “Outrenoir”, beyond black, which have since determined his work and made him internationally known.
Soulages once said that it wasn’t just black paint, it was light with which he painted. These works were created rather out of an artistic crisis. After standing in front of a canvas for hours and experimenting helplessly with the color black, he left his studio in despair, Soulages said in several interviews. When he later returned to his studio, the black had already spread across the entire canvas.
Black was the first color in art history, Soulages explained his pictorial world. The colors were indeed born with the light, but the black had already existed before, according to the painter, who also always dressed in black.
Brushes, brooms and wooden sticks: Soulages worked with the most unusual tools to create grooves and furrows in the black acrylic paint thickly applied to the canvas, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, sometimes sloping, sometimes straight, which, depending on the incidence of light, allow new structures to appear. In this way he made light an integral part of his work. None of the pictures resembles the other.
Soulages was born on December 24, 1919 in Rodez, about 40 kilometers from Conques, the son of a carriage builder. After the Second World War he went to Paris. There, alongside Hans Hartung and Francis Picabia, he met representatives of the American art scene, including Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. With his black, calligraphic imagery, he was considered the European counterpart to the American Abstract Expressionists.
He leaves posterity a comprehensive oeuvre, which is said to consist of over 1500 paintings and several hundred graphic works. Years ago, Soulages left around 500 works to his native town of Rodez. The value of the donation has been estimated at up to 80 million euros and today part of it can be seen in the Soulages Museum, which opened in 2014 and which the city dedicated to the master of the color black.
