Pierre Soulages, a French abstract painter who passed away at the age of 102, was like the Henry Ford of art: for him, black was the only colour, and he spent his whole life examining the light it contained.
“I love the authority of black, its severity, its obviousness, its radicalism,” the tall painter who was himself always clad in black, declared.
“It’s a very active colour. It lights up when you put it next to a dark colour,” he told AFP in an interview in February 2019.
Alfred Pacquement, a lifelong friend and the head of the Soulages museum in southern France, announced Soulage’s passing to AFP on Wednesday.
works by the most popular A 1960 painting by a French artist featuring broad black stripes sold at auction at the Louvre in 2019 for $10.5 million.
His paintings were displayed in more than 110 institutions worldwide, including the Guggenheim in New York and the Tate Gallery in London, and hundreds more were stored in the Musee Soulages in his southern hometown of Rodez. He was a well-known artist in France but was less well-known elsewhere.
A rare honour for a living artist, he received a retrospective at the Louvre for his 100th birthday in December 2019.
C’est avec une immense tristesse que je viens d’apprendre le décès de Pierre SOULAGES. Au nom de toutes les Ruthénoises et de tous les Ruthénois, je présente à Madame SOULAGES et à sa famille nos plus sincères condoléances.
Christian Teyssedre pic.twitter.com/Hu2mmvoGm4
— Ville de Rodez (@VilledeRodez) October 26, 2022
Beyond black
Soulages titles all his pieces “Peinture”, or “Painting” in English, distinguishing them afterwards by their size and date of production.
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