Pierre Soulages (Rodez, 1919-Nimes, 2022), the doyen of french, european painting, perhaps Western, an informalist painter who made the infinite shades of black the central theme of all his work in recent decades. Soulages’s father built carriages, and decided to put him in a religious school very early on. His father died, the boy Soulages was brought up with relative difficulty by his mother and his older sister, who ran a provincial fishing supply store.
Introverted, fascinated by his personal discoveries as a lonely boy and young man, Soulages discovered the great universal art of medieval churches by listening to his masters. Through art magazines he discovered the mystery of cave art and the Altamira Caves. With them he began to grow his interest in the «neolithic abstraction»the art of statuary prior to our civilization.
Believing that he could study and learn the art of painting, he decided to settle in Paris very soon. In vain. He abandoned his Parisian studies to try to pursue parallel studies at a private academy of painting and lithography. Much more than the Academy of Fine Arts, Soulages was attracted to the great Parisian museums and the very active life of the art galleries during the 30s and 50s of the last century.
During the nazi occupation (1940-1944), Soulages discovered the work of Picasso and Dalí, presented as degenerate artists by the German military authorities. He then began his great personal artistic revolution, with little success.
Soulages, at an exhibition of his work at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 2010
When the artistic fashions that arrived from New York imposed the new canon of American abstractions, Soulages began to paint much more pure, informal, “spiritual” abstractions. From the outset, he suffered a relative rejection of national criticism. Until several international exhibitions ended up consecrating the originality of his own personal, informal, abstract adventure, far removed from abstract expressionism.
The Soulages of maturity will remain faithful to the child who admired Neolithic cave paintings and ‘abstractions’. His work was stripping itself of shapes and colors, to enter the ocean of blacks of infinite nuances with which his work definitively culminates.
Critics were slow to recognize it. But the great exhibitions of his work during the 80s and 90s of the last century confirmed the mysterious fascination of the general public for a work so apparently distant from immediate reality, exploring the abysses, in black, always, of a spiritual, pictorial reality, which the artist built with great ferocity for himself. Picasso kept even the smallest sketches, made with colored pencils on a restaurant tablecloth. Soulages condemned to the stake, he burned, the works of his that he considered failed.