PIERRE SOULAGES

Pierre Soulages passed away on October 25, 2022, when he was 102 years old. Pierre Soulages: FromMidnight to Twilight pays homage to an unprecedented and unmatched career and honors the gallery’sdecades-long relationship with the artist and his beloved wife and partner of 80 years, Colette.Dominique Lévy remarked on their friendship and collaboration upon his death in 2022, “We werehonored to see him and Colette multiple times a year at their home in the beautiful seaside landscapeof Sète, France, where he also had his studio. The highlight of our memorable visits came whenSoulages would invite us into his studio, where he rarely had visitors and worked alone.”

The gallery’s connection to Pierre Soulages traces back to 1990 when Lévy was first introduced to theartist by Swiss gallerist and collector Alice Pauli. Then, in 2005, Senior Partner Emilio Steinberger curated an exhibition of the artist’s paintings at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York. The 2014exhibition Pierre Soulages at Lévy Gorvy, New York, included recent paintings from the artist’sOutrenoir (“beyond black”) series in conversation with seminal works created in the 1950s and ‘60s.In 2019, Lévy Gorvy presented Pierre Soulages: A Century, a comprehensive exhibition celebrating theartist’s 100th birthday and showcasing works spanning his career from the 1950s to never-before-seen paintings created between 2017 and 2019. Further exhibitions of the artist’s work at Lévy Gorvyincluded Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir in Hong Kong in 2020 and Pierre Soulages: Twenty Twenty-One inPalm Beach in 2021.

LGDR developed this exhibition in collaboration with Colette Soulages and Alfred Pacquement,president of Musée Soulages in Rodez, France, and former director of the Centre Pompidou, Paris.The retrospective will span multiple floors of LGDR’s landmark 1932 Beaux Arts-style townhouseinspired by the 18th-century Hôtel de Wailly in Paris and designed by architect Horace Trumbauer.It is a tribute to Soulages’s enduring oeuvre, focusing on his prominence in America and the dialoguebetween his work and artistic developments in the United States. The exhibition will feature, inturn, acclaimed paintings from the 1950s and ‘60s, critical 1970s canvases, and examples of the artist’srevelatory Outrenoir series created between 1980 and 2019. A noteworthy group of works on paperfrom the Musée Soulages, spanning 1995 to 2000, reveal the pure contrast of black and white—and areturn to his use of walnut stain (Brou de noix) as Soulages continued his experimentation with light.

Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight includes important loans from the Guggenheim andMetropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, and other prominentinstitutions and private collections. From the Guggenheim, Peinture 195 x 130 cm, mai 1953 representsSoulages’s success in America early in his career. In 1953, Sweeney, then the director of theGuggenheim, presented the landmark exhibition of contemporary European art Younger EuropeanPainters, which included Peinture 195 x 130 cm, mai 1953. The Guggenheim subsequently acquired thepainting—one of the first works by Soulages to be placed in a North American museum collection.Significantly, the formal and compositional qualities of the Guggenheim’s painting and others, suchas Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 10 septembre 1953, from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York, harkenback to two of Soulages’s earliest inspirations: the church of Sainte-Foy de Conques and the ancientGallic stones populating his childhood home in southern France. Here, his bold applications of blackpaint upon illuminated grounds manifest his lifelong study of capturing radiance, while evokingRembrandt’s approach to chiaroscuro.

In 1979, Soulages conceived of a new direction in his quest to paint with light. He describes theconcept of Outrenoir:

One day, when I was painting, the black had covered the whole surface of the canvas,without forms, without contrasts, without transparencies. In this extreme I saw, in a sense,the negation of black. The different textures reflected more or less weakly the light andfrom the darkness there emanated a clarity, a pictorial light whose particular emotionalpower awoke my desire to paint.

Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight represents this series with multiple works covered incontrasting densities of black pigment that reveal light through its absence, including _Peinture 254 x _181 cm, 13 avril 2008 and Peinture 202 x 143 cm, 5 avril 2019. A notable example of Soulages’s Outrenoir,the 2008 canvas features striated sections alternating between matte and gloss, resulting in the blackappearing as various hues. In the 2019 work, Soulages composed rows of irregular rectangles renderedreflectively, lending the work a sculptural quality and referencing the modern, art historical, andarchitectural influences evident in Soulages’s oeuvre from the beginning.

Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight will be accompanied by a scholarly publication including an introduction by Alfred Pacquement and an illustrated comparative chronology by CamilleMorando, Head of Information and Research on Modern Collections at the Musée national d’artmoderne—Centre de Création Industrielle, Centre Pompidou, Paris. The gallery’s prior publicationson the artist include Soulages in America (2014), comprising an interview with writer and directorPhilippe Ungar that explores the artist’s work in the 1950s and ‘60s and his prominence in Americaand New York; and Pierre Soulages (2014) which features an interview with the artist by Hans UlrichObrist. Accompanying Pierre Soulages: A Century in 2019 was a comprehensive catalogue with essays byPacquement and American art critic Brooks Adams, as well as a chronology.