Pierre Soulages
France, 1919
French painter, printmaker and sculptor. He was greatly impressed as a boy by the Celtic carvings (incised menhirs and graffiti) in the museum at Rodez and by the architecture and sculpture of the Romanesque abbey of Ste-Foy at Conques. In 1938 he went to Paris for the first time, where he visited the Louvre and saw exhibitions of Cézanne and Picasso. With the intention of training to be a drawing teacher, he enrolled in a studio in Paris but was encouraged instead to enter the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts; he was, however, bitterly disappointed by what was being taught there, which seemed to fall far short of what he had just seen, and returned to Rodez. The paintings he was making at this time were of trees in winter, without their leaves, with the black branches forming a tracery against the sky. He was called up in 1941 but demobilized almost at once. He moved to Montpellier to continue his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts there but spent most of the war working clandestinely on a farm in the Montpellier area to avoid forced labour in Germany. He was able to do very little painting during the Occupation, but he became aware of abstract art through his friendship with Sonia Delaunay, whom he met c. 1943.
Although the bold, gestural character of Soulages’s work has often been compared to the Abstract Expressionism of such artists as Franz Kline, the resemblance is only superficial. Instead of relying on improvisation, he built up his forms very deliberately, often over a period of several months, and aimed to achieve a formal, balanced beauty. He gave his paintings no title or identified them only by the date of their completion. His work took a decisive new turn in 1979, when he began to make very large paintings, often combining several panels, that were entirely covered with a thick coat of black oil paint. They rely for their effect on contrasts of texture, rhythm and direction of brushwork, produced by alternating bands of corrugated or smooth surfaces. His work also includes a number of aquatints and lithographs, and from 1975 several bronzes related to the irregular shapes of the plates used for making the aquatints.
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