Pierre Soulages valuation
Spent fifty years painting in black, and called what came off it outrenoir.
Pierre Soulages was born at Rodez in 1919 and said the prehistoric standing stones and the Romanesque abbey of Conques near his home mattered more to him than any museum.
What a work by Pierre Soulages is worth
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Bio
Pierre Soulages was born at Rodez in 1919 and said the prehistoric standing stones and the Romanesque abbey of Conques near his home mattered more to him than any museum. He painted almost exclusively in black from the 1940s, using walnut stain and then oil dragged across the canvas with scrapers and rubber blades. In January 1979 he covered a canvas entirely in black and found that the light reflecting off the ridged surface was the subject — he called it outrenoir, beyond black, and worked on nothing else for the next forty years. He designed the windows at Conques, and died in 2022 at a hundred and two.
The outrenoir paintings are the market and they are unusually dependent on physical condition, because what is being valued is a surface that catches light: any scratch, scuff, flattening or retouching destroys the reflection the work exists to produce, and none of it can be repaired invisibly. Lighting and hanging are part of the work. The earlier walnut-stain works on paper are a distinct and more accessible field. Soulages produced a substantial output of etchings and lithographs. The market is centred on Paris.
At a glance
- Born
- 24 December 1919, Rodez
- Died
- 25 October 2022, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire De Nîmes
- Movements
- Informalism, Abstract art, School of Paris
More on Wikipedia.
Conques, Rodez and the Louvre
Between 1987 and 1994 Soulages made 104 stained-glass windows for the Romanesque abbey church of Sainte-Foy at Conques, after around seven hundred tests. The Musée Soulages in his home town of Rodez opened in 2014, and the Louvre gave him a retrospective for his centenary in December 2019. He died in October 2022, at 102.
Titles are usually Peinture with the dimensions and the date, so the full title as written on the reverse, with the gallery's records, is what identifies a painting among many that look alike.
Montpellier, Courbevoie and the New York galleries
Soulages's father was a carriage maker who also ran a hunting and fishing shop, and Pierre was brought up by his mother and his older sister; as a child he dressed in black, which his mother disliked. Drawn by Cézanne and Picasso, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris but soon left, finding the teaching too traditional. He studied at the fine arts school in Montpellier, where he met Colette Llaurens, whom he married in October 1942. After the war he took a studio at Courbevoie and painted in complete abstraction, with black dominant, and he first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1947.
He also designed stage sets. Betty Parsons showed his work in New York in 1949, Leo Castelli organised an exhibition at Sidney Janis in 1950, and from 1954 he showed with Samuel Kootz, the year he also exhibited at the Venice Biennale. The 104 Conques windows were developed at a small glass factory near Münster. He said his instrument was the light reflected from the black rather than black itself, and explained outrenoir as a different country from black, in the way that outre-Manche means England. In 2014 President François Hollande called him the world's greatest living artist.
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