This article was published on December 1, 2019. On the occasion of the death of the famous painter, we have chosen to offer it to you again this October 26.
Even for the photo, his chair had to be black.
He insists.
And shows it to us, at the other end of the living room.
The magnificent centenarian—he will have them on December 24—had nevertheless sat down on a white chair, tired, not wanting to get up anymore.
But Pierre Soulages is keen to make the effort, not a small one, after a day marked by minor health worries.
The black, decidedly, holds it upright.
The greatest living French painter, and the most expensive as evidenced by his painting acquired for 9.6 million euros at public sale this week, is preparing his exhibition at the Louvre – only Chagall and Picasso were entitled to it in their lifetime before him — which opens on December 11, and takes care of its image.
Black clothes from head to toe, since the age of reason.
This Wednesday, November 27, in Sète, in the house for which he drew the plans himself in 1959 and which overlooks the Mediterranean, next to the marine cemetery where Paul Valéry rests, we are finally moving towards the great man, after weeks, months of waiting to get the interview.
A monument, including a hundred museums in the world, from the United States to Australia, from Norway to Japan, from Scotland to Russia, has at least one work.
He measures 1.90 m, "a little less now", he slips into an imperceptible mischievous smile.
While waiting for him, in his living room opening onto a huge terrace facing the sea, the gaze registers the two paintings of him that adorn the walls, a sofa, and the table around which Colette, his wife, makes us wait.
She is much smaller than him, and younger, 98 and a half years old… “She is a year and a half younger than me”, insists the painter with a hint of mischief.
They had no children, lived in fusion since their meeting at the School of Fine Arts in Montpellier in 1941, and their wedding, all in black, at midnight, a year later.
Pierre Soulages and his wife, Colette./LP/Frédéric Dugit LP/Frédéric Dugit
"Pierre and Colette", many people have been talking about it for a long time in the art world.
Inseparable.
She is his alter ego, his lookout, the one who protects him.
Their tenderness surfaces even in their vulnerability.
Both hear badly, but get along so well, after 77 years of marriage.
When she speaks to him, and he has to listen, she takes his arm.
It was the young woman who took the first step when they met: “I had just been cured of typhoid,” she says.
I returned to the Beaux-Arts after a long absence, I did not recognize any face.
There is one that I liked.
I took my stool and sat down next to him.
It was Soulages.
And her life as an artist?
“After we met, I never touched a paintbrush again in my life,” she slips into an amused smile.
"These impressionists are very stupid"
One woman, one color.
Black, for both.
Exactly, he is coming.
His gaze, with an intensity that grabs you, an intelligence that leaves no respite, makes you forget all your questions.
Anyway, he has things to say right away, a hundred years and not a minute to lose.
Love was a good entry point, because he uses it several times in conversation.
And first to explain the secret of their longevity: “It's to love life!
» And, he adds after a silence, « to do something less stupid than what we often do, unfortunately ».
What he means by this is the radical affirmation of his freedom, the refusal of the path that has been mapped out.
That of an orphan from a modest family in Rodez, of rural origin, who lost his father, a cart manufacturer, at the age of six.
And who will not discover his first painting museum until after adolescence, in Montpellier and Paris.
“Walnut stain on paper 48.2 x 63.4 cm” by Pierre Soulages./ADAGP/Archives Soulages LP/Frédéric Dugit
He has always been drawing.
The painter of black returns to an anecdote told a thousand times, but which still amazes him as much.
“As a child, I was dipping my brush into the inkwell.
They ask me what I'm doing.
I answered:
Snow
.
With black!
As I was a shy child, it was not provocation.
I probably wanted to make the paper whiter by using the contrast of black.
Another story comes back to him.
“In high school, a lady sees me using black.
She said to me:
Let's see my little one, you absolutely must not use this color, the Impressionists have banned black from their palette
.
I obeyed, but I said to myself:
These Impressionists are very stupid.
" We laugh.
Him too.
For an abstract, Soulages is very concrete.
The landscapes of the highlands of his childhood in Aveyron, for us, release an energy at the origin of his non-figurative paintings.
The evocation of his native region ignites him: “That's the starting commitment, that.
I like large, solitary plateaus, large expanses with large skies, the Causses, Aubrac where I spent my holidays.
Here, in Sète, in front of the sea, there is a view that reminds me of it.
You find what you love.
The very large formats of his paintings, which require him to lay the canvases on the ground to work on them, echo this.
“Light is an accident”
The love of immensity.
He, who has physicist friends of international renown and is necessarily passionate about black holes, lets go of the evidence: "If we think of the cosmos, of what the universe is, we realize that light is a accident.
» The black of space.
The black of prehistory too.
“Prehistoric cave painting says more about human beings than pretty portraits.
The Renaissance never really won me over.
When I saw Greek statues, I thought it was wonderful, the precision, the craft, what a quality, but me, these first men who painfully, with difficulty, awkwardly, tried to bring a figure to life, it upset me much more than the Greeks.
»
He returns to it several times, as if he felt intimately connected to these first artists in history.
“Why was there, from the beginning of humanity, a being, a species of great ape, who drew shapes on a rock, with black for that matter?
This is a question I asked myself when I was very young.
The first time that my name, Soulages, was written in a museum, it was in Rodez, because I had taken part in excavations with a local archaeologist, and found something under a dolmen.
»
Pierre Soulages in November 1977./DR LP/Frédéric Dugit
“Pierre” like the menhirs that inspire it and to which it resembles.
“Soulages” whose etymology means “powerful sun”.
Everything hangs together: in 1979, the year of his 60th birthday, the artist invents "outre-noir", a new technique based on light, to which he has remained faithful for 40 years, and which settles him definitively. as a great innovator.
The canvas is first completely covered with an acrylic black.
Then Soulages arrives with his blades, his brushes, sculpts the canvas, streaks it, shapes, deforms, and discovers that his black, like the sea, changes color, from light gray to very dark, depending on the natural light.
Much more than a find.
“This other light that comes from the painting itself, which is multiple, almost infinite,
sometimes touches deep layers of what lives in us without our knowing it.
That's what I call loving, by the way.
»
He's not done.
To love as to paint.
Alfred Pacquement, a long-time friend, who organizes the tribute exhibition of around twenty masterpieces at the Louvre, also laughed when he discovered in recent months an even more monumental canvas than usual, in the Sète workshop, and which will be exhibited at the Louvre.
“I was dazzled in every sense of the word, by the format, the light, the beauty.
Colette Soulages talks about it with amusement: “Alfred couldn't believe it, above all.
A centenarian, embarking on such a project!
»
It's almost hard to believe.
This late afternoon, Soulages is moving with difficulty.
He doesn't worry about it, too much to do with his paintings.
“I have to take care of things that are a little complicated and that bother me these days,” he says with a slight hint of Aveyron accent.
He never says more about a work in progress.
Running, running, from the start and to the very limit of his strength.
“It comes from the people”
His vocation, Soulages speaks of it as if it dated from yesterday.
“With a school group, in the 1930s, I visited the Abbey of Conques, near Rodez.
It's not a matter of belief.
I remember exactly where I was in the nave when I had a moment of elation and that's the only thing that matters in life.
I said to myself:
I like to paint and I will make it my main activity
.
Not my job, not making money with it — I was thinking of becoming a drawing teacher — but I said to myself very clearly:
This will be what will count in my existence
.
And what came as a shock to me, much later, was that I was asked to do the stained glass windows.
»
From 1987 to 1994, the giant from the highlands produced 104 stained glass windows for this abbey, a masterpiece of Romanesque art.
A fidelity, a deepening.
Like the creation of a museum in his name in Rodez, in 2014, an extraordinary temple to the variety of his work, crossed by incandescent blues, sublime clearings.
The artist did not want this museum but accompanied it, and populated it with many of his favorite paintings.
Perhaps also the pride of bringing 900,000 visitors to his home in five years, near his birthplace.
“Here, it's a bit of nowhere.
The nobility of Soulages is the artisanal world of Rodez.
It comes from the people,” emphasizes Benoit Decron, director of the museum.
From De Gaulle to Macron
Soulages leaves the imprint of his passages, through his works, in his matrix cities.
In Montpellier, the Fabre museum has built a wing specially to house some thirty of its finest masterpieces.
Right here where he proposed to Colette, in 1941, their first joint outing... Time passes, we have forgotten everything else.
Soulages and the presidents.
He knew them all, from De Gaulle to Macron.
A little less Mitterrand, "because I was friends with Michel Rocard", he smiles.
General de Gaulle already called him “Master”.
Relieves, ageless.
The interview is over, but the presidents amuse him: “Sarkozy came twice.
The first, nothing.
The second he was with Carla, completely different.
She's an artist, really.
She reacts.
Very sincere.
He appreciated Chirac's replies.
“To Putin who came to see an exhibition twice that the Hermitage Museum had dedicated to me, Chirac replied during dinner:
Yes, the first time to see, the second to understand
”.
And Macron, who had lunch last year in this same house where we are?
Soulages found him “very knowledgeable” about his painting, and “Brigitte” began by greeting everyone in the kitchen: “It may have been done intelligently, but it was successful.
»
Basically, we are moving away.
Of black.
Essential.
Of this man so surrounded but alone — with Colette, like Adam and Eve — facing an enigma that has lasted since prehistoric times.
Why do we paint?
We even thought that great painting was threatened by photography, cinema, minimal and conceptual art, and everything that strays from pigment.
He smiles: “I understand that there are those who wanted to take a scalpel and do some dissection.
But I prefer life, me.
Life and his desire to paint, every morning in the world.