French abstract artists

Pierre Soulages is amongst the planet's leading abstract painters of present years. On the event of his 90th birthday he is being honoured by a retrospective in the middle Pompidou in Paris. Starting on 2 October 2010 Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau should be showing this exhibition in an altered form.

Over 70 photographs of their innovative durations, from works together walnut stain (1947 to 1949) to your radically black paintings of modern times calculating up three metres large, are increasingly being shown, most of them for the first time in Germany. They illustrate the powerful artistic growth of this most well-known of modern French artists.

Born on 24 December 1919 in Rodez, a tiny city positioned on north of and about equidistant from Toulouse und Montpellier, Pierre Soulages declined to train on “Ecole nationale superieure des beaux arts” in Paris, becoming out of sympathy in what he saw as that organization's retrograde approach to art. Rather he invested the season 1939 visiting events and familiarizing himself using works of Picasso and Cézanne. But that same 12 months he left Paris and headed south to Montpellier to wait the “Ecole des beaux-arts” here. At that moment he made the acquaintance of Sonia Delaunay, which showed him catalogues containing what those in energy at that moment regarded as “degenerate art". For Soulages this is the justification for being employed as an abstract singer. Following The war he moved to Paris, in which he successfully exhibited within the Salon for the Surindépendants. Their acquaintanceship with Francis Picabia and Hans Hartung in 1947, and his knowledge of the American scene as represented by such artists as Marc Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Wilhelm de Kooning, show just how rapidly he had been getting an international reputation. In 1948, three years after the end for the 2nd World War, he participated inside after that pioneering convention “French Abstract Painting”, which a. o. was shown in Stuttgart, Hamburg and Düsseldorf. He was the youngest of a small grouping of masters of abstract art, including these types of names as Kupka, Doméla and Herbin. Their participation in Documenta we, II and III brought him recognition in artistic and important circles.

His wayward design, and more particularly his almost unique dependence on color black, give him an original invest the field of art, even though United states Robert Motherwell produced similar leads to a few of their works. But only Soulages regularly dedicated their actively works to the colour black over a period of years, before eventually turning to light.

Their “outrenoir”, a phrase created by Soulages when it comes to usage of black inside the work, swallows up light, especially in their deals with report, achieving a specific sense of depth. “Outrenoir”, that might be translated as “the opposite side of black”, or “beyond black”, cannot exclude, but draws the observer into the photo, inducing him to make a detailed and exact study of the task by keeping their look.

Like many painters, Pierre Soulages is fascinated by the trend of light. He seeks obsessively for methods of permitting light operate when you look at the color black. Works in which black colored is followed closely by a moment color including blue or purple remain the exception.

Their specific design, characterized by strong bold lines and occasional calligraphic elements, is a vital organizing principle in his works. “I found tiny brushes just for the actual work, because ended up being required and essential in the skill of the 19th century and earlier in the day – Picasso himself caused fine brushes in the early works. However for myself there was no concern of this. I wanted to use anything very different, therefore I went into a paint store in Paris and bought myself broad brushes and rollers for the type useful for house-painting.“ By using this technique in combination with a dark walnut stain generally “de noix” he created their first masterpieces, certainly one of that was purchased because of the Museum of contemporary Art in nyc as soon as 1948.

Their paintings are to be found in the selections of over 100 galleries global, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; the Hermitage, St. Petersburg; the Musée national d’Art moderne, Paris; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia; the Museum of contemporary Art, Toyama; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; together with Musée d’Art contemporain, Montréal, to call just a few.