Pierre Soulages was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. In 2014, François Hollande described him as “the world’s greatest living artist.”
Pierre Soulages Cause of Death
Pierre Soulages, whose searching explorations of the color black established him as France’s pre-eminent postwar abstract painter, died on Wednesday in Sète, a port city in southern France. He was 102.
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.
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 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.