Artist of black – Culture – Kommersant

Yesterday, October 26, one of the most eminent French artists, Pierre Soulages, died in a clinic in the city of Nimes. He was 102 years old, of which he devoted more than 70 to abstract painting and black color.

According to the unspoken laws of a “correct” biography of a genius, a great artist should not live long, and his life should not be easy. Tragedies, wars, dangerous addictions, intemperance in all the pleasures of life and illness harden – life-creation on the verge of life and death is an almost obligatory component of the image of the inhabitants of the artistic Olympus. Picasso and Matisse, who lived for a very long time, of course, contradict this given construction, but you can’t call their lives calm. Pierre Soulages lived an incredibly long time for an artist, a very long time for a simple person, was married to the same woman, leaving her a widow after 80 years of marriage, never changed once and for all the accepted “style”, did not hesitate along with the line of development of abstractionism , and all this did not prevent him from becoming the absolute star of French art of the second half of the 20th century.

In 2019, Pierre Soulages opened his exhibition at the Louvre, an honor that only a few of the artists who have not yet passed away have been awarded, and recognition of the status of the main icon of contemporary art in France.

Soulages’ biography is linear: he was born in 1919 in the small town of Rhodes in southern France, his father was a craftsman, a master of horse-drawn carriages, he came to art through a passion for archeology, Paleolithic drawings and several books on art that were available. He himself always told the same story in his interviews about himself, painting and black color: “When I was still a child, I loved to draw winter trees without leaves – I was struck by the contrast between the bright sky and the pattern of branches. Even then it seemed to me that these forms are very rich. And I was also told that when I was little, I was caught dipping a brush into ink and asked what I was doing, and I proudly replied that I was painting a snowy landscape. Everyone laughed then: the ink is black. Today I would say that I am trying to make paper whiter with ink. And I understand that as a child I was already an abstract artist, but I didn’t know about it.”

In 1938 he came to Paris to enter the main art school in France – Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He entered, but quickly stopped going to classes. Paris offered him other painting lessons – primarily in the galleries, where at that moment one could still see the stunning exhibitions of the recently deceased Cezanne and the absolute champion of the pictorial world of Picasso. Well, and the Louvre, of course, in which Rembrandt’s graphics taught working with black and white much better than any academic course. In 1940, he was mobilized, a year later he was demobilized, for another four years, in order not to thunder into the war again, he pretended to be a farm laborer, left Paris for Montpellier, where he met his future wife Colette and studied “degenerate art” on Nazi propaganda.

After the war, he and Colette go to Paris, where they will remain until their death. In 1946, Soulages’ work was rejected by the Salon des Indépendants, and from 1947 he began to exhibit in truly independent galleries and salons. Writes abstractions. Then not yet pure black and white, he often uses the brown color of walnut shells, red, blue, ocher colors also appear.

However, pure white, seeping through layers of paint, was the highlight of each of his works.

In the 1940s, Soulages wrote in small format, then his compositions would grow and grow into huge church stained-glass windows. Only one thing will not change – the black color and the purest abstraction. At the same time, he himself categorically denied his connection with the theorists of abstract art of 1910–1920: “In the 20th century, of course, this is Malevich, Rodchenko, Mondrian, Delaunay. But there is a big difference between me and them. These artists immediately began to build theories and, as it were, became their hostages. And in order to free themselves from these theories, they sometimes had to completely change. I don’t want to theorize, theory cannot precede a work, every work is an experiment.”

This biography is almost boring, but the fame that Soulages gained in France, and then throughout the world, is more an exception than a rule. In the 1940s, abstract art was in great vogue. But this fashion came exclusively from across the ocean, where “American abstract expressionism” became the hallmark of the New World France, which had finally taken revenge on the fine arts for many centuries. The dominance of American artists in this field was so important that the State Department itself helped finance their triumphal exhibitions throughout post-war Europe (the arrival of American expressionists in Moscow in 1959 is an action of the same kind).

Soulages, on the other hand, offered his own version of the American novelty, while not copying either Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. He also abandoned the much more geometric abstractions of his French predecessors.

Its black color was both Europe’s response to the greatest war in history, the United States, and France’s return to the international contemporary art scene. France welcomed him with open arms, and already in 1949 his work went to exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA as “new European art”, and in 1967 he had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. American museums have long refrained from accepting his works in their permanent exhibitions. However, the widest fame, the highest prices for works (in 2021, his work of the early 1960s went at auction for $ 20.2 million) and the incredible consistency of Soulages made this gap.

For the last 40 years, Pierre Soulages has been the main attraction of French art, his name was on the shield of the Republic, he had his own museum, haters among the young, who are supposed to hate the great old men, and many things to do. In 2001, he admitted that he had written 1,200 works in total, and these were all variations of black. Soulages was not bored in this black and white world, and for a long time he did not want to defeat anyone: “My painting does not represent anything, does not depict. I don’t like to compare different types of art, but there is music with words, and there is music as such. My painting is also just rhythm, just color, just space.”

Kira Dolinina