2010 was an important year for Pierre Soulages. In celebration of the artist entering his 10th decade (on 24 December 2009), the Musée National d’Art Moderne, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, held the significant retrospective exhibition, ‘Soulages’. Open from 14 October 2009 to 8 March 2010, over 500,000 people visited, making it, at that time, the best-attended exhibition for a living artist in France. 

Of the phenomenal response, Soulages said: ‘The history of art that touches me the most – and which for me counts as much, if not more, than the writings of the greatest art historians, is this history of the spontaneous art that come back to me in the form of hundreds, thousands of letters that I receive from visitors who have come to see my painting at the Pompidou Centre and who want to tell me what they have experienced before them’.

Fueled by these letters of support, Soulages’ work flourished. At the beginning of May, he started a dynamic new series, of which this painting from 19 May is part. With its furrows of flat, matt black set against reflective, glossy ribbons, the piece is an exceptional display of the creative energy that Soulages harnessed. Made by using a knife or spatula to scrape away layers of semi-dried paint to reveal fresh, shiny pigment of different viscosity, Soulages’ reorientation of the canvas while working on it sent the gouges in numerous different directions. Consequently, as one walks past the painting, the varying play of light across its surface invests it with a dynamic sense of movement.