Pierre Soulages

Pierre Soulages was a French painter who devoted much of his long career to a single color, black. Born in 1919 in the south of France, he became one of the leading abstract painters of postwar Europe. From the late 1970s he focused almost entirely on thick black paint, scoring, ridging, and sculpting its surface so that it caught and threw back the light in changing ways.

He called this approach outrenoir, meaning beyond black, treating the reflected light off the dark surface as the true subject. His huge, textured black canvases seem to shift as you move around them. Honored throughout France and beyond, and remarkably productive into old age, Soulages died in 2022 at 102, celebrated as one of the great abstract artists of his time.