Pierre Soulages

To see the Pompidou’s Pierre Soulages retrospective, spanning more than sixty years of artistic output, is to process the evolution of an idea, to experience a panoramic progression toward formal purity. Of the two modes of artistic creativity identified by the Chicago economist David Galenson—Old Masters, who develop their work gradually through years of trial and error, and Young Geniuses, who upend convention in a flash of inspired certitude—Soulages, age ninety, is firmly situated in the former camp.

The narrative begins with Soulages’s innovative walnut-stain works from the late 1940s. Almost like proto–Franz Klines (if less calligraphic and more static), they feature carefully rendered abstract forms centered on canvas. From here, Soulages loosens his brushwork, introduces color (mostly muted patches of ocher and maize), and extends the pictorial plane beyond the confines of the frame. Dating from the 1950s, these tactile and layered works are characteristic of the postwar impulse toward gestural abstraction, whether the European tachism or its American counterpart, Abstract Expressionism. By the late 1960s, Soulages reverts to a monochrome palette; black begins to conquer the canvas with stark, graphic intensity. Though these works remain gestural and dynamic, his touch is methodical, measured, and deliberate. This tendency is fully realized in his monochrome “outrenoir” (ultra-black) works, which he began in 1979 and continues to produce. Reflective surfaces are usually thought to interfere with vision, but Soulages’s deploys oil paint or, more recently, acrylic to create texture and court reflection. His treatments, ranging from fine, parallel striations to thickly troweled staccato strokes, orchestrate sublime dramas of shadow and light.