Superstar French artist Pierre Soulages gets a major New York art show this autumn
Soulages, dubbed “the painter of black,” died in October last year aged 102.
ADVERTISEMENTA year on from the death of iconic French artist Pierre Soulages, his work is celebrated in a major New York exhibition now open.
Soulages, born in 1919 and dubbed “the painter of black,” died in October last year aged 102.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid a personal tribute to the artist in a ceremony at the Louvre.
This autumn’s exhibition, titled Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight, is an indepth retrospective of the artist’s work.
Housed in the Lévy Gorvy Dayan, it features numerous loans from institutions including the Met and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
The show is organised by Dominique Lévy in collaboration with the artist’s 102-year-old widow Colette Soulages and Alfred Pacquement, the former longtime director of Centre Pompidou, who co-organised the 2019-2020 Louvre exhibition of Soulages’ work.
The retrospective spans seven decades of the artist’s career, with an emphasis on the 1950s-60s New York art establishment that fostered his early rise to global recognition.
“In the early 1950s, there was strong interest in my work [across Europe] and even in Brazil and Australia,” said Soulages in 2014. “But the most decisive impact came from America. It all happened so fast.”
In 1949, Soulages had his first-ever solo exhibition in Paris; by 1953, his paintings were in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Phillips Collection, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
The exhibition also features his late-career Outrenoir (“beyond black”) paintings, which he started in 1979. This formal pivot would redefine the rest of his career and earn him the moniker of “the painter of black.”
In these works, he played with the physical properties of light itself, paired with thickly applied black paint, to actualise material questions he had explored since his earliest paintings.
Close encounters
While Soulages’ paintings are celebrated in their own right, much fascination has surrounded his relationships - from fleeting encounters to close personal friendships - with now-canonical cultural figures of the time.
Soulages also gained popularity with cultural figures beyond the art world; his collectors included Hollywood A-listers of the time, and John Coltrane was said to be a fan as well.
The New York show includes an entire room dedicated to Soulages' 1940s-70s involvement with his contemporary creative luminaries.
These also included Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Alexander Calder and Yves Klein.
Despite these encounters and relationships that he valued deeply, Soulages rejected formal associations. “I’ve never been part of any group. Every time I felt a group forming, I hightailed it,” the artist said in 2014.
Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight will be on show at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan until November 4, 2023.
