Tribute to Soulages

Pierre Soulages, who died on 25 October and would have been 103 years old on 24 December, is the subject of a full feature this month in Beaux Arts Magazine. The beautiful cover page announcing "24 pages in homage to Pierres Soulages (1919-2022)" is as black as it is luminous, in the image of the world-famous works of art of the creator of "outrenoir". And these twenty-four pages, although the quotations can be criticised for being sometimes redundant, provide an interesting overview of an original work that seemed never to end. For the painter, who believed that there was "nothing to tell" about his paintings, just "to feel", has nevertheless always caused a lot of ink to flow... black, of course.

This is a good opportunity for Fabrice Bousteau, the magazine's editor-in-chief, in addition to devoting his editorial to the second painter after Georges Braque in 1963 to have received a national homage in the square courtyard of the Louvre, to republish his article recounting the visit he made in 2009 to the master's house on the heights of Sète, as well as the interview they both had in his studio in 2019. The first time was on the occasion of the second Soulages exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, and the second time, ten years later, to prepare the celebration of the painter's centenary, which took the form of a real consecration at the Louvre Museum. "This living treasure of painting was looking back for us on eight decades of pictorial and cerebral dazzle," explains Fabrice Bousteau. Always with Colette by his side, this former student of the fine arts in Montpellier whom the painter had married in 1942 and who had immediately given up all personal artistic activity.

We know. It is of course very easy to doubt the strength of an all-black painting, and to discuss the excesses of the art market, suspecting it of having once again put together a work of art just to raise the price of paintings for sale... but only as long as you have not stood in front of an original painting by Pierre Soulages. Because there, it's the illumination. Whether at the Fabre Museum, in the entire sublime wing devoted to him in Montpellier, a little further on in the museum he finally agreed to have dedicated to him in Rodez, his birthplace, or even at the bend in one of the innumerable exhibitions where Pierre Soulages shines on its walls... it is difficult to remain unmoved, as one might be, in front of a reproduction of a painting for sale, or a photograph, no matter how beautiful. If the demonstration is perhaps less immediately striking with the paintings of his first forty years, sometimes painted with walnut stain, sometimes with ink, acrylic or oil, but always leaving the "white crackling", there is no longer any room for doubt with the famous "Outrenoirs" which were born in 1979 under the painter's brushes, brushes and scrapers. We are dealing with a genius who has succeeded in finding the light in the darkness.

"The light comes from the painting and the viewer is no longer in front of it but in the space of the canvas," Pierre Soulages explained to Fabrice Bousteau and Solène de Bure in June 2019. "The larger the format, the more obvious the effect. As a result, the space of the canvas is no longer on the wall, as in traditional painting, or behind it, as in a perspective. It is in front. It's a way for painting to have a different relationship with space. All the magic is there indeed. As for the great debates opposing abstraction and the figurative, Pierre Soulages had long since stopped caring. "Abstraction is a critic's concept; it is not mine. I've known about these quarrels, but I don't dare say that I was indifferent to them. What interests me is what comes out of the canvas.

From the day the artist realised that he was not working with black, but with 'the light reflected by the colour black', he who had previously used black as a contrast suddenly changed his whole way of painting. And he never went back. It was 1979, outrenoir was born. The journey beyond black had begun. And as Emmanuelle Lequeux writes for Beaux Arts Magazine, "it would be wrong to think that he was straying from his path when, for the Abbey of Sainte-Foy in Conques, he composed incomparable stained-glass windows from 1986 to 1994, intended to replace the medieval playlets imposed under Pétain. His first total work of art. On 104 windows, a translucent and ever-changing grey-white, reinforced by black lines, underlines the power of the Romanesque architecture. With their singular grain, their milky and deliberately irregular glass, these stained glass windows rise like a Gregorian chant turned into light. This metaphor is all the more apt when one considers that Soulages means "acting sun" in the Aveyron region.

From his first exhibition in 1947, the groundwork was laid. Although the abstract work that the young artist proposed in 1946 at the Salon des indépendants in Paris was rejected, what he exhibited the following year at the Salon des surindépendants immediately attracted the attention of Hans Hartung and Francis Picabia. Germany, where he exhibited in 1948, and the United States, where the curator of the MoMA bought a painting from him in 1949, would nevertheless make room for Pierre Soulages well before post-war France, where, according to the painter himself, "the fashion was not for black, but for yellow, red and blue". The Kootz Gallery immediately represented him in New York and took over his artworks for sale. Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman were his equals. Franz Kline, too, was one of the leading exponents of abstract expressionism, with whom Soulages was often associated, although the French painter always refused to be confined to any artistic movement, stubbornly seeking his own truth in the light of his own darkness.

In the 1950s, when he began to crush his pigment with a knife and colour could still appear as a background in his oil paintings, the young painter developed a particular varnish that he explained was composed of "colloidal silica with grains so fine that they correspond to the wavelength of light". Magical.