In 1952 the Museum of Modern Art acquired a painting from Pierre Soulages then thirty three years old. Better known in the United States in the fifties and sixties, Pierre Soulages is famous in France where in 2014 a museum dedicated to his work was opened in Rodez, his hometown. He was also commissioned for the glass windows of the nearby Romanesque church of Sainte-Foy in Conques. He coined the term "outrenoir" (beyond black) to define his practice and is known as the painter of black and light. “Soulages, another light”, the title of the latest exhibition at Musée du Luxembourg is followed by a subtitle "Paintings on paper" which reveals the content of the show dedicated to a less known side of Soulages's career. The artist recalls that as a young boy he drew trees in the winter and painted the snow black. He adopted abstraction early on and never wavered in his quest for the light reflected by the color black. He passed in 2022 at the age of one hundred and two. He is survived by his wife and life-long companion, Colette, who was involved in the selection of the one hundred and thirty paintings on paper among more than eight hundred, representing the production of the artist from the forties until the early two thousands when he abandoned paper and media like walnut stain, charcoal, India ink or gouache for the exclusive use of acrylic resins on canvas. The chronological retrospective fills the entire space of the museum with works on paper and includes two videos featuring interviews with the artist.
In the early forties while still a student the young artist inspired by Old Masters like Le Lorrain, Rembrandt, adopted figurative and sfumato techniques as seen in two drawings of portraits laid behind a glass casing at the entrance. Giving up art school in Paris, back home, he experimented with walnut stain and carpenter's tools readily available in his surroundings. Without transition it seems, he adopted abstraction to paint spontaneous ideograms on paper, bringing into play the nuances and transparency of the dark brown to golden walnut stain. A line up of his charcoal and walnut stain paintings represent his production in the forties, as recognition came early for the artist. In post-war Germany, he was not only invited to participate to a yearlong travelling exhibition (1948-1949) with ten other abstract French painters, but also one of his work was selected for the exhibition's poster. His name appears on a number of these, advertising solo or group exhibitions, proof of his growing fame in France. The next room dedicated to works from the fifties feels confined. The walnut stain takes a darker tone and veers to black with thicker intersecting lines mainly straight sometimes angular and even forming swirls, filling the entire pieces of paper. An inner serenity oozes from the paintings evoking Far Eastern calligraphy. The following works from the sixties are of bigger size and feature large expanses of China ink contrasting with the white paper, black made alive by variations in thickness and fluidity. Abstract expressionism comes to mind. In 1957, although already shown in the United States, Soulages made his first trip to New York City where the movement was flourishing. There he met a number of artists, among them Robert Motherwell. In other paintings, the artist favored the wash technique for his subtle pale blues or light greys transpiring through the black geometric designs. Back and forth from paper to canvas, in 1977 he experimented with color in large-scale gouaches on paper represented by four loud blue paintings displayed side by side. We can follow his attempts at thick black "zips", linear ragged lines with ink, or scribbles with graphite. His return to the organic walnut stain in the late nineties and early thousands produces a series of quiet primordial landscapes made of earth colored strata interrupted by bands of light projected by the white paper, evoking the harsh land of his youth, his everlasting source of inspiration.
In a video of his interview with the journalist Pierre Dumayer in 1969, Soulages professes his natural passion for painting, a calling he describes as a necessity. A second interview with the art historian Pierre Encrevré relates how he discovered inadvertently the light in the color black after a day of hard work, followed by a nap.
Tachism, abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, ..., Soulages never did fit in a movement, pursuing his own path. The exhibition underlines the artist's decade-long experimentations through his paintings on paper for sixty years (1940's until 2000's). Even glued to a support, paper limited the size of the works, often somber behind the glass, smothered by their frames. The artist shared his thoughts: "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". This statement gives a clue to his radical move away from paper to thick layers of acrylic resins on large canvases sometimes hanging from the ceiling which allowed him to sculpt the paint and find the light. The retrospective at Centre Pompidou in 2009 revealed the achievement of the then ninety-year old artist. Immersed in the "Ultrablacks", under the spell, the visitor (I was one of them) could appreciate the culmination of his lifetime's quest.
photographs by the author:
-walnut stain on paper, 1950
walnut stain and oil on paper, 1947
-ink on paper, 1961
-walnut stain on paper, 2003
-gouache and China ink on paper, 1951
