‘Soulages, another light’, The Works on Paper at the Musée du Luxembourg

04 November 2025

From 17 September 2025 to 11 January 2026, the Musée du Luxembourg presents ‘Soulages, another light. Paintings on paper’, a major exhibition produced by the GrandPalaisRmn, devoted to the artist’s often overlooked yet essential paintings on paper. Bringing together 130 works—more than thirty of which have never been shown before—the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to explore the medium that accompanied Pierre Soulages throughout his life, from his first experiments in 1946 to his final works in the early 2000s.

Pierre Soulages (1919–2022), born in Rodez, remains one of the most significant figures in post-war abstraction. Rejecting any hierarchy between mediums, he moved fluidly between canvas, print, bronze, and paper. For Soulages, paper was not a preparatory surface before excecuting finalised works on canvas but a field of full artistic expression. His first brou de noix (walnut stain) paintings of 1946–47 marked a turning point: broad, assertive brushstrokes, created a play of transparency and opacity that defined his distinctive approach to form and light. “I felt constrained by oil,” he once said, describing how impatience led him to seize walnut stain and brush and “throw himself upon the paper.”[1]

The exhibition retraces this journey chronologically, beginning with the 1940s, when Soulages’ compositions caught the attention of figures such as Francis Picabia and Hans Hartung, and when one of his brou de noix works was chosen for the poster of Französische Abstrakte Malerei (1948–49), the travelling exhibition that established his reputation in post-war Europe. The following decades saw the artist deepen his exploration of ink and gouache, pushing the expressive boundaries of black and white, rhythm and structure, gesture and space.

From the monumental gouaches of the 1970s to the final works of the early 2000s, Soulages’ practice on paper mirrored the evolution of his celebrated outrenoir paintings—those black surfaces where light itself becomes colour. Even as his technique evolved, his conviction remained constant: “A painting,” he wrote, “is an organised whole, a humanisation of the world.”[2]

Supported by the Musée Soulages in Rodez, ‘Soulages, another light’ showcases a quieter, more intimate aspect of his oeuvre.