Pierre Soulages, whose searching explorations of the color black established him as France’s pre-eminent postwar abstract painter, died on Wednesday in the port town of Sète, in southern France, aged 102, reports The New York Times.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Dominique Lévy and Emilio Steinberger, the co-founder and senior partner of LGDR, the gallery that represents Mr. Soulages in the United States, reports The New York Times.
Mr. Soulages attracted attention in the late 1940s with a series of bold calligraphic works on paper using walnut stain or, on occasion, tar on glass. Their somber tones stood in sharp contrast to the bright colors favored by the adherents of Tachisme, France’s answer to Abstract Expressionism. In comparison, he told Interview magazine in 2014, his paintings “looked like a fly in a glass of milk.”
In his work from the 1960s and ’70s, swaths of black were scraped away to reveal colored backgrounds, but the overall composition — dark slashes made with a wide brush, which critics have often likened to the calligraphic marks of Franz Kline — remained consistent with his earlier work. James Johnson Sweeney, curator of painting at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and ’40s, characterized Mr. Soulages’s imposing, static forms as “a chord played on the piano and held.”
Mr. Soulages quickly developed a European reputation; his work appeared in the Venice Biennale in 1952 and the inaugural Documenta exhibition in Kassel, West Germany, in 1955. In New York, the reputation-making Betty Parsons Gallery showed his work in 1949, and Sidney Janis followed suit a year later in an exhibition organized by Leo Castelli.
In 1954 Mr. Soulages began exhibiting with the Samuel Kootz Gallery, which played a major role in promoting Abstract Expressionism but also championed modern European artists. He adopted the practice of titling his works by dimension and date, and of hanging his paintings from the ceiling.