My wife, who has nice legs, has a black-and-white skirt that she bought at a vintage-clothing boutique in London. I love it and call it her jupe Soulages. I like walking a few paces behind her when she wears it so that I can watch the fabric sway back and forth. It’s full of rock’n’roll energy—the kind of skirt that makes you want to dance. One day she wore it with black stockings, and it was a real pleasure to see those flashes of black and white swirl around the metronome of her legs. Everything about her outfit was extraordinarily luminous, joyful and elegant.
    Thanks both to that charming skirt and to Hans Hartung, a painter I deeply admire, I already knew how luminous black could be even before going to see the wonderful Pierre Soulages exhibit at the Pompidou Center. Soulages spent decades investigating and finally mastering the luminosity that surges from the darkness. Even as a young boy, he liked to play with the contrasts between black and white: Drawing a snowy field with an ink-soaked paintbrush on a piece of white paper, he intuited quite correctly that the black would make the white of the paper look even whiter still. It took him three decades of work, occasional setbacks and experiments with paint as well as ink, tar and walnut stain to master this extraordinary aesthetic paradox—this “black and light” that has been the lifelong focus of his work and an endless source of discovery.
    Not only does black emit light, but it absorbs and reflects light in such a manner that it changes the way color is perceived. Soulages calls this chromatic phenomenon outre-noir, “beyond black,” the way the expression outre-mer used to conjure up undiscovered lands beyond the sea. His canvases beckon viewers to experience an inner dream or silent meditation as they observe the magical luminosity that wells up from the darkness.
    I find there’s something very French about Soulages, not just personally but in the essence of his work. Although he stands straight as an arrow and his gaze is as dark and luminous as his canvases, the painter just celebrated his 90th birthday. Born in the austere, landlocked Aveyron region shortly after World War I, he was curious about archeology and prehistory, but apart from the Romanesque art of the local medieval churches, he wasn’t exposed to any outside artistic influences. His love of painting was innate and reference-free.
    Already as a young boy, Soulages preferred to dip his brush into an inkpot, even though he had a set of watercolors. Why? He has no idea. This would remain true throughout his long, solitary and original artistic career. He has never formulated any kind of abstruse discourse about his work or associated it with any other movements. He has no message. Attempting to explain the unexplainable—abstraction—he simply says that he doesn’t “portray,” he “paints.” Most especially, he paints for himself rather than others. This is quite clear to him, although he acknowledges that his paintings are made to be seen.
    A rather wonderful thing about Soulages is that his individualism achieves universality. Off in his own corner exploring black, he was warned by Picabia, among others, that he would make enemies. But he couldn’t have cared less. He continued to play with darkness and ignore artistic trends…and finally the trends caught up with him (“I love all colors, as long as they’re black,” Karl Lagerfeld once said). Now, at age 90, he is the most famous living French painter—an unassuming, hard-working Aveyronnais whose canvases were collected by Nelson Rockefeller and are found in all the world’s great museums. He has always insisted on forging his own path, and today everyone recognizes its value.
    Indeed, Soulages’s obsession with black has long been in tune with the zeitgeist. His lifelong exploration of the darkest end of the chromatic spectrum has been well suited to a century hardly illuminated by the Enlightenment spirit. His artistic experiments have been radical, reflecting the rigors of the time. And when he finally finds a glimmer of light among the shadows, when he offers it to us with infinite delicacy, we know, as does Soulages, that it is a frail and flickering thing, like a little flame that could be extinguished at any moment. He is a painter of hope in desolate times, a meditative painter who invites us to feel at peace, even in the darkest of days. He tells the truth and grants us solace, giving night the hopefulness of day and offering us a glimpse of happiness whenever an attractive woman wears a pretty skirt that makes us want to dance with her on the edge of the abyss.
“Pierre Soulages” is on view through March 8 at the Pompidou Center; centrepompidou.fr.