French Iconic Painter Of Black Pierre Soulages Dead At 102
PARIS (AP) — Pierre Soulage, an icon of post-World War II European abstract art known for his use of black, has died at the Soulage Museum in his hometown of Radez. He is 102 years old.
Soulage became very influential with his black paintings, which he called "noir-lumiere" or "black light".
In the year In 2019, the Louvre held a major retrospective of Solages on his 100th birthday, with the museum calling him "an important figure in non-figurative painting" and celebrating his "unique strength".
Solage's early nut brown and black paintings led to works that defined his life: "outrenoir" or "beyond black" paintings. It was almost always pure black, pressed with paint on a large canvas, then scraped with a knife and brush to a sculptural level.
Soulage discovered this technique while painting Black Swamp in 1979, which he considered a failure. Then he realized that painting "light comes from color, which is the absence of light." The viewer's reflection and changes in daylight become part of the art, creating a "new mental space," he said.
Born in Rodez in the southern French province of Occitania in 1919 after World War I, Pierre Jean-Louis Germain Soulage grew up fascinated by stone, landscape and antique crafts.
In 1936 and 1937, the first beginnings of his painting career gave him the desire to work in Paris. While teaching in Montpellier around this time, he met his future wife, Colette Lawrence, with whom he would live the rest of his life.
In the year In 1943 Soulage had an important meeting, he met the artist Sonia Delaunay, who introduced him to abstract art. But at the end of the Second World War, the young artist opened his first studio in the capital of France and organized his first exhibition in 1947.
Especially in the post-war United States, it has been gaining international recognition.
Soulage's work appeared in major exhibitions in the US, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955.
He is considered a national treasure in his native France.
His legacy includes 104 stained glass windows from 1987 to 1994 at Saint-Foy de Conx, the Roman monastery he visited as a child.
In the year In a retrospective at the Pompidou Theater in Paris in 2009, Soulage couldn't help but fall in love with the color black.
In a statement to reporters, he said, "Black is for violence, not for crying, but also for celebration..." He said, "I don't know when."
Called "the most famous of living French artists" at the Pompidou Center, Soulages was brilliant until the end. For decades, he has held retrospectives around the world, from Houston to Seoul, South Korea.In 2001, he became the first living artist to be exhibited at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Solage Museum It opened in 2014 in his hometown of Radez in the south of France.
The artist is intelligent and contemporary. When asked about his work, he once joked to The Associated Press, “It's so hard, I wanted to tell you what I'm doing tomorrow.
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