ART-PRESENTATION: Pierre Soulages,Painting 1946 – 2019

Known as “the painter of black and light,” Pierre Soulages has forged a career remarkable not only for its rigorous invention, but for its longevity. Since the postwar period, the artist has evaded participation in such movements as Abstract Expressionism, tachism, and informel—rather contextualizing his paintings in terms of vitalism, classicism, and prehistoric forms.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum Frieder Burda Archive

To mark the Pierre Soulages’ 100^th birthday Museum Frieder Burda is organizing “Painting 1946 – 2019”, a major retrospective show of his work, gathering together seminal works from the last seven decades. Some 60 works have been brought together from international collections and the exhibition is being held in close cooperation with the artist himself. Pierre Soulages’ work is indelibly inscribed on the history of contemporary art, from his early beginnings in the aftermath of the Second World War right up to the current day. Born on 24 December 1919 in Rodez in southern France, Soulages celebrated his hundredth birthday in 2019 with an exclusive exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. His creative productivity, which has been marked from the very start by a radical artistic consciousness and a resilient, defiant stance, has withstood the forces of time and continues unabated, as his latest large-scale pictures, on show at the exhibition, amply demonstrate. Since his debut, Soulages has opted for total abstraction, questioning the traditional givens of classical painting. His position has been a unique one since 1948, and not just because of the materials (nut stain, tar) and tools he uses. He identifies his canvasses by means of technique, dimensions and date of realization rather than giving them a title that might influence the observer’s perception. In his own words, “A painting is comprehensively organized, an ensemble of shapes (lines, colored surfaces …) on which the meanings ascribed by the viewers are continuously being constructed and deconstructed”. A collection of his early paintings on paper, including sumptuous nut stain paintings – hardly known outside France – illustrates Soulages’ own very personal interpretation of abstraction. These works from the years 1946-1948, which are seldom part of public collections, form the starting point of the show. It was in Germany, as Soulages has repeatedly insisted, that “everything began” for him. Indeed, his involvement in the traveling exhibition “French Abstract Painting” in 1948-49, of which he was the youngest participant, and the selection of one of his paintings for the billboard, were determining factors in the early fame garnered by his works. And there’s more. He was the only artist to take part in the first three editions of documenta in Kassel, in 1955, 1959 and 1964. His creative period up to the late 1970s is characterized by large-scale pictures featuring pure black, black and white or black with discreet touches of color. In 1979, Soulages embarked on a new phase of his work for which he proposed the neologism outrenoir, a style of painting “beyond black”. The rapport between dark and light is a constant in his painting experiments but with outrenoir, his painting demonstrated a multiplicity of light using a single color. In contrast to a monochrome work, “different textures, smooth, fibrous, calm, tense or agitated, which embrace or reject the light, give birth to gray blacks or deep blacks”. By painting over or scratching off or adding a single pigment, Soulages succeeded in bringing forth the light by contrasting brightness with darkness. One spectacular experience is created by monumental paintings that hang from the ceilings, seemingly floating in space.

Info: Curator: Alfred Pacquement and Udo Kittelmann, Museum Frieder Burda, Lichtentaler Allee 8b, Baden-Baden, Duration: 17/10/20-28/2/21, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 10:00-18:00, www.museum-frieder-burda.de