"It's what I do that teaches me what I'm looking for."
-Pierre Soulages
Career
Two major exhibitions of European artists, Younger European Painters at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (1953) and The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors at the Museum of Modern Art (1955) in New York, featured his paintings. In 1979, Soulages was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. From 1987 to 1994, he produced 104 stained-glass windows for the Romanesque Abbey church Sainte-Foy in Conques (Aveyron, France). Soulages is the first living artist invited to exhibit at the state Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg and, later, with the Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow (2001).
Soulages became known as "the painter of black," describing the main color of his distinctive palette "both as a color and a non-color." By using light as a medium, Soulages was able to focus on texture, depth and optical illusions. He saw the use of black as a direct link to prehistorical societies and ancient artistic practices; these works were self-labeled Outrenoir (Beyond Black).