Pierre Soulages

Life and work

Pierre Jean Louis Germain Soulages was born at Rodez, in the Aveyron, in 1919, and died at Nimes in 2022. His father, a carriage maker, died when the boy was five, and he was raised by his mother and his older sister. Two things marked him early and never left the work: the standing stones of the Aveyron countryside and the Romanesque abbey church of Sainte Foy at Conques. He began at the Ecole nationale superieure des beaux arts in Paris, left quickly because the traditional teaching disappointed him, served in the war, and studied again at Montpellier. He opened a studio at Courbevoie and painted in complete abstraction from the start, with black dominant and walnut stain as an early medium. His first showing was at the Salon des Independants in 1947. Recognition in the United States came fast: Betty Parsons showed him in New York in 1949, he was included in Younger European Painters at the Guggenheim in 1953, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and the Museum of Modern Art placed him in The New Decade in 1955.

Outrenoir

The word is his own coinage and has no English equivalent. French says outre Manche for England and outre Rhin for Germany, so outrenoir names a country lying beyond black rather than simply a darker black. From about his sixtieth year he covered whole canvases in a single black and then worked the wet surface with spoons, small rakes and pieces of rubber, cutting striations and ridges into it. The point is not the pigment but what happens to the light that falls on it. A ridged passage throws light one way and a smooth passage another, and matte and glossy blacks set side by side read as different colours entirely. He said that his instrument was not black but the light reflected from black. He preferred to hang the large polyptychs away from the wall, on wires in the middle of a room, because he wanted a painting to be a wall rather than a window, something that looks into the viewer instead of out at a view. The canvases carry no titles, only the word Peinture followed by the dimensions and the date.

Glass, museums and honours

Over seven years he made one hundred and four stained glass windows for the abbey church at Conques, the building he had loved as a child, arriving at a glass that fragments light rather than letting it pass through. Some seven hundred trials at a small works near Munster preceded the installation, which was completed in 1994. He was the first living artist invited to exhibit at the Hermitage. The Musee Fabre at Montpellier devoted a room to his donation in 2007, the Centre Pompidou held a retrospective in 2009, and in 2014 the Musee Soulages opened at Rodez around some nine hundred works given by the painter and his wife. The Louvre marked his centenary with a retrospective in 2019. He held the Carnegie Prize, the Praemium Imperiale and the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, and a President of France once described him as the greatest living artist in the world.

What reaches the saleroom

Almost everything offered under this name outside the museum world is printed: lithographs, etchings and screenprints made with Michel Caza and other printers, and catalogued in the published literature by Pierre Encreve. The registers price far apart, and edition size together with the manner of signing is what separates them. A Serigraphie n numero 16, signed and numbered in pencil from an edition of two hundred and fifty, made GBP 9,600 at Bonhams in London in 2023. Against that, the small Serigraphie 9, signed only in the plate and published by the City of Paris in an edition of fifteen thousand, made only a sum in the hundreds of euros at Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr in 2025. Both are genuine Soulages sheets. The difference is the size of the printing and whether a hand signature is present. LLB Auction has offered impressions of that same Serigraphie 9 twice without finding a buyer, while a lithograph under this name made a five figure sum in euros here.