PARIS.- Rarely the focus of standalone exhibitions, Pierre Soulages’ works on paper form a vital part of his artistic journey. As early as 1946, he began exploring this medium using walnut stain, applying bold, sweeping marks that immediately set his work apart within the abstract movements of the time.

Thanks to exceptional loans from the Musée Soulages, the exhibition brings together 130 works produced between the 1940s and the early 2000s, including 25 never shown before.You'll discover a group of paintings on paper, long kept in the artist's studio, which testify to the constancy and freedom with which Soulages approached this medium.

After favouring walnut stain in the early years, Pierre Soulages often returned to the material used by cabinet-makers, whose qualities of transparency and opacity, and luminosity in contrast with the white of the paper, he loved. He would also use ink and gouache for works whose generally small formats yielded nothing to their formal power and diversity.

By highlighting this group of paintings on paper, the exhibition invites you to rediscover Pierre Soulages in a practice that is both intimate and decisive, at the heart of his plastic language.

THE EXHIBITION

1. The 1940s

Born into an artisanal household, Soulages attempted to paint the landscapes of the Causses when he was still a teenager. Marked by his visit to the abbey of Sainte-Foy de Conques, he decided to pursue painting but refused to accept the place he was offered at the École des Beaux-arts in Paris because the teaching offered there did not suit him.

Returning to Montpellier, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-arts where he met Colette Llaurens, whom he married in October 1942. In order to escape the compulsory labour service, he went underground. He moved to Courbevoie in the spring of 1946, then to Paris the following year and a new studio in Montparnasse.

Abstract from the start, his earliest works drew the attention of fellow artists such as Francis Picabia and Hans Hartung, and critics and writers including Michel Ragon and Roger Vailland.

While Soulages painted around fifteen canvases in 1946-47, it is mainly his paintings on paper that constitute the true origins of his work. He began with charcoals, applied energetically to the paper. But these lines of movement soon left him dissatisfied.

He opted then for walnut stain, an ordinary material used by carpenters to dye wood. Its dark and warm tone allowed him to achieve transparency and opacity naturally using house painters’ tools. His broad and powerful lines are inscribed with hieratic signs that gradually occupy the space on the paper.

2. Französische Abstrakte Malerei, Germany, 1948-49

On the initiative of Dr Ottomar Domnick, an admirer of abstract art, a travelling exhibition of French abstract painters toured German museums during 1948-49. This followed the participation of German painters in Paris in the third Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, featuring artists who had been banned from painting and exhibiting by the Nazi regime.

The Französiche Abstrakte Malerei exhibition brought together ten painters from different generations, chosen by Dr Domnick, including some of the historical pioneers of abstraction such as František Kupka or César Domela. It was presented successively in seven museums and was a political and cultural event of great importance. Soulages was by far the youngest participant with works on canvas on display, and he also presented a series of paintings on paper that are renowned for their graphic power. His inclusion in the exhibition, while still largely unknown, not to mention the choice of one of his walnut stain pieces for the poster, will add to his ever growing reputation.

3. Documentation Centre

The approximately eight hundred paintings on paper (1946-2004) created by Pierre Soulages form a major part of his oeuvre, seen in his earliest exhibitions.

Depending on the artist’s choice, these works on paper are displayed along with paintings, prints or bronzes, or sometimes alone. His paintings on paper featured heavily in the earliest retrospectives in the early 1960s, allowing the public to discover the art of Soulages using different media and techniques. These works were featured in several posters for group or solo exhibitions and cultural events, giving them wide visibility.

The 2000s can be seen as a foundational period in the artist’s oeuvre, presented at the Soulages museum in Rodez, inaugurated in 2014, as well as in exhibitions dedicated to his paintings on paper, including a retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg, the first to be held in Paris.

4. The 1950s

Soulages’ work gained international visibility during this decade. Starting in 1954 and eight times over the following ten years, the Kootz Gallery in New York exhibited his recent paintings, which were popular with American collectors. Soulages rarely exhibited in his own country during this period, although the Berggruen Gallery in Paris presented a collection of gouaches and aqua fortes in 1957, which made a significant impression at the time. Nutmeg remained his preferred material at the start of the decade, with broad, sometimes knife-cut strokes. His materials and techniques were diversifying at varied rates. Some paintings with intersecting marks can be compared to his canvases from the same period, in which the same formal structure can sometimes be found.

5. The 1960s

Soulages was now working in two studios, one in Paris and the other in Sète, in the house that Colette had built facing the sea. The sixties saw the first museum retrospectives in museums, initially in Germany (Hannover, Essen, etc), then in the United States (Boston, Houston) and finally in Paris, at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. Paintings on paper were created in large numbers alongside canvases, proof of their significance to the painter. 1963 saw the first exhibition exclusively dedicated to paintings on paper at the Galerie de France in Paris, with some fifty works gathered from 1946 to 1963. The critic Michel Ragon also produced the first book on these works at the same time. During this decade, Soulages favoured ink and often worked with contrasts between layers of black ink, sometimes treated with wash, and the white of the paper, while his formats grew in size. A 1963 painting of exceptional dimensions was exhibited at Documenta III in Kassel in the following year.

6. The 1970s

A major retrospective at the Musée d’Art et d’Industrie de Saint-Étienne in 1976 gave significant place to his paintings on paper, particularly the walnut sprinkles of the years 1947-51. Several exhibitions were also held in museums in Latin America during this period, confirming the painter’s international stature. In 1973, and again in 1977, Soulages abandoned canvas in favour of paper. He produced one hundred large vinyl gouaches over the course of 1977, which he continued the following year. It was the Galerie de France again that revealed that works in a double exhibition at the International Fair of Contemporary Art and on its own walls. These new paintings were characterised by their monumentality consisting, for some, of broad lines running across the white of the paper. But Soulages never limited himself to a single style. A series of gouaches gave way to the blue colour often found in his canvases from the same era. Others are dominated by black combined with subtle greys obtained from ink wash.

7. Final paintings on paper : 1995-2004

The year 1979 saw the start of a new phase of painting that Soulages named «outrenoir» (beyond black), exhibited for the first time at the Centre Pompidou. The canvases were now fully coated with a single black pigment. Depending on the tools used to apply the material, blade or brush, the texture of the surface, ragged or smooth, will alter the light to present different qualities. Paintings on paper became more scarce. At times, however, Soulages would return to this medium for large works created with lead pencil on a black background (a method he had never used before) or using black and white contrast, applying the ink by tearing or printing on random surfaces, as seen in certain canvases from the same period. He finally returned to walnut stain, structuring the space into wide horizontal black or brown stripes of great power, leaving room for splashes of white.

Soulages no longer used paper after 2004, devoting himself to the endless possibilities offered by «outrenoir» painting, until his death in October 2022 at the age of 102.