PIERRE SOULAGES

Importantly, as Pierre Encrevé, the author of Soulages’s catalogue raisonné, notes, the artist’s paintings on paper are autonomous and do not constitute studies for the canvases. He states, “Paper never functions as the place for making sketches that the canvas might then lead to completion; rather, it is a specific creative territory where freedom to experiment authorises what sometimes appears, after the event, as genuine prefigurations of what the painter did on canvas only later.” He continues, “For Soulages, there has never been a hierarchy between works on canvas and works on paper.”

The earliest innovations that would determine the rest of Soulages’s storied career catalysed on paper in 1947. Breaking with the figurative and colourful neo-Fauvist paintings of the School of Paris that were widely exhibited at the time, Soulages turned to walnut stain (brou de noix) on paper to create striking abstract compositions. He reflected, “It was with the walnut stain paintings that I was able to get myself together and obey a kind of inner imperative. The truth is that I felt restricted by oils. I’d used them before the war, and I knew what the constraints were. One day, in a burst of impatience and temper, I grabbed some walnut stain and some housepainter’s brushes and unleashed myself on paper.” Traditionally used by artisans to dye wood, walnut stain represented a utilitarian, everyday material that the artist could control by way of concentrating or diluting the walnut powder. Its malleable fluidity and depth of hue—ranging from brown to black—created layered effects of transparency and opacity, especially when combined with the absorptive properties of paper.

Soulages sought similar flexible densities in his subsequent paintings on paper utilising ink and gouache. These pigments allowed him to work with luminosity in different ways than in oil and acrylic on canvas. Across his paintings on paper, the white of the paper constitutes a compositional form. In these works, he seeks, as he described, an “[emerging] relationship with the ground: a painterly light sparked by contrast or the picture’s reflection of light.” Expanding his use of unconventional materials, Soulages took up scrapers, blades, sponges, and other tools of his own invention. He explained, “Not wanting to be tricked by the tools that were on offer and that didn’t suit me, because they were made for a kind of painting with a practice and an ideology that didn’t suit me, I made my own tools.” Soulages advanced his artistic experimentations with light on paper until 2004, creating a body of work featuring active and involved surfaces marked by an interplay of bold, saturated strokes and those seemingly illuminated in their transparency. While exhibited throughout the artist’s career, Soulages’s paintings on paper have been the subject of increased study, most recently through the donation of over one-hundred works in 2014 to the Musée Soulages, Rodez, France; a large-scale focused exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, from 2025 to 2026; and a forthcoming catalogue raisonné that will accompany that of the works on canvas.

Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan.