Pierre Soulages, in memoriam
Pierre Soulages, one of the leading figures in post-war European painting, died on 26 October 2022 at the age of 102.
Image: Pierre Soulages in 2019 – Photo by NVP3D, NPV Switzerland, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.
Born in Rodez, France, on Christmas Eve 1919, Soulages studied briefly at the École Nationale Supérieure des beaux-arts, but it was not until the years after the Second World War, following his participation in the 1947 Salon des Indépendants, that his painting began to gain recognition.
If Yves Klein was the painter of blue, Soulages was the painter of black, a colour (or non-colour) he often used in his abstract paintings. “I’ve always loved black, and I realized that, from the beginning, man went into completely dark caves to paint. They painted with black too. They could have painted with white because there were white stones all over the ground, but no, they chose to paint with black in the dark,” the painter explained to Interview Magazine in 2014.
The art market has also recognised the importance of Soulages’ work. In November last year, Sotheby’s auctioned his “Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 4 août 1961” for just over $20 million, a record for a work by the artist. Just a week ago, Christie’s Paris auctioned four paintings from the latter part of Pierre Soulages’ career for between 1.5 and 2.4 million euros each.
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