22 Facts About Pierre Soulages

Pierre Soulages produced 104 stained-glass windows for the Romanesque architecture of the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques from 1987 to 1994.

Pierre Soulages received international awards, and the Louvre in Paris held a retrospective of his works on the occasion of his centenary.

Pierre Soulages was born in Rodez, Aveyron, on 24 December 1919.

Pierre Soulages's father, Amans, was a carriage maker who ran a hunting and fishing shop.

Pierre Soulages dressed in all black, and his mother disliked it.

Pierre Soulages opened a studio in Courbevoie, Paris, painting in "complete abstraction", with black as the dominant colour, and experimenting with walnut oil.

Pierre Soulages exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and in New York City the same year, gaining recognition in the United States.

Pierre Soulages's works were included in the two major exhibitions of European artists, Younger European Painters at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1979, Pierre Soulages was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Pierre Soulages studied the way that light wouldn't cross through the stained glass, but would be fractionally fragmented, exploded through the stained glass.

Pierre Soulages was the first living artist to have been invited to exhibit at the state Hermitage Museum of St Petersburg and later with the Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow.

In 2007, the Musee Fabre of Montpellier devoted an entire room to Pierre Soulages, presenting a donation he made to the city.

In 2014, the Musee Pierre Soulages opened in Pierre Soulages' hometown of Rodez, as a place to permanently display his works and to house temporary contemporary exhibitions.

Some space in the museum is always reserved for exhibitions of other contemporary artists, as Pierre Soulages had wanted from the beginning.

In 2014, Pierre Soulages presented fourteen recent works in his first American exhibition in 10 years, at Dominique Levy and Galerie Perrotin, New York.

The infatuation Pierre Soulages had with black began long before his investigations with 'Outrenoir' at the age of 60.

Pierre Soulages often used bold cuts in vertical and horizontal lines, the crevasses and forms created by using angles and contours.

Pierre Soulages's works had to be hung without frames in exhibitions.

Pierre Soulages died in Nimes on 25 October 2022, less than two months before his 103rd birthday, and was survived by his wife.

Pierre Soulages had marked their 80th wedding anniversary the day before his death.

Collections of works by Pierre Soulages are held by many museums, including:.

Exhibitions of art by Pierre Soulages were accompanied by publications including:.