Brooks Adams, Courtney Fiske, Sy HoahwahPierre Soulages : A century

“This superb volume celebrates the 100th anniversary of the “painter of black”. Fully illustrated, it reproduces works by French painter Pierre Soulages from the 1950s to the present day, illustrating his enduring role in the dialogue between European and American painting and inviting viewers to consider a body of work that injected deep poetry into abstraction through its adherence to a single material: black paint.

With a Plexiglas cover in homage to Soulages’ stained glass windows at the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques, the book is published in English and Chinese. An essay by Alfred Pacquement, who also co-curated the Soulages exhibition at the Louvre in 2019, reflects on the critical reception of Soulages’ work internationally. An essay by Brooks Adams traces Soulages’ engagement with architecture throughout his career. Poems by Sy Hoahwah and Virginie Poitrasson respond to Soulages’s life story and his work, while a chronology of the artist’s life includes many excerpts from Soulages’s writings appearing here for the first time in English.”