French painter Pierre Soulages dead

The French artist and stained-glass designer, Pierre Soulages, has passed away at the age of 102. He will be remembered for his uncompromising use of the colour black, and for the stained-glass windows he designed for the abbey church in the central French town of Conques.

Pierre Soulages in 2019, the year the Paris Louvre honoured him with a retrospective. JOEL SAGET / AFP

"I love the authority of black, its seriousness, its inescapability, its radical nature," Soulages said of his favourite colour. "Black offers amazing possibilities. It is an extraordinarily active colour."

Pierre Soulages is one of the few French painters to have been honoured with a retrospective by the Louvre, during his own lifetime.

Despite his worldwide renown, Soulages never lost touch with his native Averyon, in the mountainous south-west.

Before the black-out: a Pierre Soulages painting at the French National Museum of Modern Art. © Adagp, Paris 2009

He never lost his humility, either. Told that the sale price of one of his paintings from 1960 had set a world record of 9.2 million euros, Soulages dismissed the news saying, "that just proves that there are people who can afford to buy paintings."

Since 2014, Soulages's home town of Rodez has boasted a museum devoted to his work. 

World renown and recognition

Pierre Soulages was born on Christmas Eve 1919. His father was a carriage maker. His mother ran a shop selling fishing and hunting equipment.

Precociously talented, he was admitted to the Paris Beaux-Arts school just before the outbreak of the Second World War. He was not an enthusiastic follower of the official syllabus, preferring to return to Montpellier in the south.

There, he met and married Colette Llaurens in 1942, and the couple returned to Paris.

Soulages was encouraged by avant-garde luminaries such as Picabia and Fernand Léger, but said he could not find himself in the rage of colour unleashed by the abstraction then in vogue. 

Detail from a Pierre Soulages painting. © Siegfried Forster / RFI

Working with the most basic of colours and equipment (Soulages preferred house-paintrers' brushes to the fine art instruments favoured by many of his contemporaries), he saw his work accepted by such global institutions as the Guggenheim in New York, and London's Tate.

As his work became almost exclusively black, reminiscent of the final murals created by his close friend, Mark Rothko, Soulages explained that he had moved into a new mental field. "The paint in the pot is black," he said, "but what matters is the light, the way it is reflected and difused."