Pierre Soulages

Pierre Jean Louis Germain Soulages (; ; 24 December 1919 – 25 October 2022) was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. In 2014, President François Hollande of France described him as "the world's greatest living artist." His works are held by leading museums of the world, and there is a museum dedicated to his art in his hometown of Rodez.

Soulages is known as "the painter of black", owing to his interest in the colour "both as a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens a mental field all its own." He saw light as a work material; striations of the black surface of his paintings enable him to reflect light, allowing the black to come out of darkness and into brightness, thus becoming a luminous colour.

Soulages produced 104 stained-glass windows for the Romanesque architecture of the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques from 1987 to 1994. He received international awards, and the Louvre in Paris held a retrospective of his works on the occasion of his centenary.

Early life and family Soulages was born in Rodez, Aveyron, on 24 December 1919. As a child, he was interested in the area's menhirs,

After wartime military service, he studied further at the Fine Arts School of Montpellier. He also worked as a designer of stage sets. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954, gaining recognition in the United States. Betty Parsons Gallery showed his work in New York in 1949. prepared by around 700 tests at a small factory near Münster, Germany.

In 2007, the Musée Fabre of Montpellier devoted an entire room to Soulages, presenting a donation he made to the city. It included twenty paintings dating from 1951 to 2006, among which were major works from the 1960s, two large "plus-black" works from the 1970s, and several large polyptychs. A retrospective was held at the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou from October 2009 to March 2010. In 2010, the Museum of Mexico City presented a retrospective of paintings that also included an interview-video with the artist. The paintings represent all stages of his work, from post-war oils to a phase of work he calls Outrenoir. It was the most complete display of work from his first 30 years. Some space in the museum is always reserved for exhibitions of other contemporary artists, as Soulages had wanted from the beginning. ahead of the retrospective at the Louvre Museum in December celebrating his 100th birthday.

On 17 November 2021, his Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 4 août 1961, was auctioned for $20.2M, an auction record for the artist. Naming his own practice Outrenoir (Beyond Black), the paintings he produces are known for their endless black depth, created by playing with the light reflected off of the texture of the paint. Knowing that he needed a new term to define the way that he worked, Soulages invented 'Outrenoir' to define his practice. Not having a translation into English, the closest meaning is 'beyond black'; in a 2014 interview he explained the definition of the term, "Outrenoir doesn't exist in English; the closest is "beyond black." In French, you say "outre-Manche," "beyond the Channel," to mean England or "outre-Rhin," "beyond the Rhine," to mean Germany. In other words, "beyond black" is a different country from black." Initially inspired by his interest in the prehistoric and his desire to retreat to something more pure, primal, and deliberately stripped of any other connotations, he explains his fascination with the colour black: "During thousands of years, men went underground, in the absolute black of grottoes, to paint with black." He often used bold cuts in vertical and horizontal lines, the crevasses and forms created by using angles and contours. In his recent work from 2013 to 2014, Soulages began to explicitly vary the pigment used in the paint, mixing matte and glossy types of black as well as hardened densities of black pigment. Preferring to suspend the paintings like walls, he uses wires to hang them in the middle of the room, "I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it's a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall. A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite—it should look inside of us". His works had to be hung without frames in exhibitions. They were married on 24 October

Soulages died in Nîmes on 25 October 2022, less than two months before his 103rd birthday, and was survived by his wife. He had marked their 80th wedding anniversary the day before his death.

Collections Collections of works by Soulages are held by many museums, including: Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) Honolulu Museum of Art Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Musée Soulages (Rodez) Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro) National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) Grand Prix for Painting (Paris, 1975) Rembrandt Award (Germany, 1976) Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1979) Grand prix national de peinture (France, 1986) Praemium Imperiale for painting (Japan, 1992) Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2006) Prix Julio González (Valencia, 2006) Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour (Paris, 2015) Grand prix du rayonnement français (France, 2019)