Rodez - Musée Soulages

Pierre Soulages, born on December 24, 1919, in Rodez and died on October 25, 2022, in Nîmes, was a French painter and engraver.

In 1946, he moved to Paris and devoted himself entirely to painting. He soon became known as a European counterweight to the American Abstract Expressionists, although his own black-and-white pictorial worlds differed significantly from Pollock's Action Painting. His black, calligraphic forms quickly became his trademark. Since 1979, all his paintings have been monochromatic black. He developed his "outrenoir" paintings, meaning "beyond black". In these works, he no longer worked directly with the applied paint, but rather shaped and modulated the reflections of light as it struck the treated black surface through the use of color.

From 1987 to 1994, he produced 104 stained-glass windows for the Abbey of Sainte-Foy in Conques. These windows overwhelmed me, when I reached Conques following the Via Podensis in 2015.

The dedicated museum was opened in 2014.