Corinne LaBalme saw only the dark side of Pierre Soulages, France’s most celebrated living artist, until she visited his namesake museum in Rodez, Aveyron, and saw the light.

Pierre Soulages is the rare artist who’s been able to attend his own centenary celebrations. Born in 1919, he’s been prolific enough to have filled countless retrospectives around the world last year. But age alone doesn’t explain why prices for his work have reached dizzying heights, as his work entitled “200 x 166 cm 14 mars 1960,” which sold for 9.6 million euros (about 10.5 million dollars) in November 2019. (When it comes to Soulages titles it’s just the facts: size and date completed.) There is something extraordinary about his work, though I didn’t realize it until I visited his namesake museum in Rodez, his birthplace in the Aveyron department of central southern France.

Soulages is best known for working within the realm of outrenoir, which is often translated in English as “ultra-black” or “beyond black.” He coined the word in 1979 to describe paintings that he coated in thick black pigment before meticulously raking them into shape with masonry tools generally used on grout and mortar.

“The vehicle is light, not black,” the artist has explained numerous times. “Black is a violent color, it imposes itself, it dominates, it’s the original color.”

Nevertheless, his Darth Vader-ish canvases never imposed themselves on me. While they were instantly recognizable in contemporary art exhibits, my own magpie attention was always diverted by the turquoise Hockney swimming pools or the neon Warhols that flanked them. Once you’ve seen one big Soulages, you’ve seen them all, I thought.

Wrong.

It took a press trip to Rodez, a town so isolated in the volcanic plateaux of central France that the “fast” trains from Paris take seven hours to get there, to alter my perception of Soulages’ outrenoir. Seeing mass quantities of his paintings in a building that was purpose-built to show them off can be a mind-bending, magical and quasi-religious experience—my Come-to-Gesso experience.

In 2005, Soulages donated 500 of his works to the municipality of Rodez. (He now resides in Sète, the nearest Mediterranean town to Rodez.) Until the completion of the museum in 2014, Rodez’s sole main architectural claim to fame was its red sandstone Notre-Dame Cathedral (1276-1531). The museum, designed by the Catalan architectural firm of RCR, now also holds a claim. It consists of five slightly tippy parallelepiped boxes set in a 7.4-acre garden in the center of town. Its rusty Corton steel façade echoes the red sandstone of the Gothic cathedral that stands 600 yards away. (In 2017 the firm won the Pritzker Architecture Prize.)

As the artist has repeatedly told interviewers, his outrenoir painting are all about the light. Yet when I’ve seen his work in group shows, the industrial lumens that make Motherwells and Pollocks sparkle and shine left Soulages looking like the designated driver at the art party. Soulages painting don’t photograph well either. They need to be experienced in motion i.e. the motion of the viewer.

The cavernous museum in Rodez, with its darkened rooms and large windows, allows the paintings to come alive while revealing their secrets. A canvas that appears from one angle to be somber as a moonless night in an urban blackout will from another angle burst into an array of molten golden shimmers.

It’s hard to say more about the outrenoir gold seam. It’s about as close to alchemy as anything yet seen on earth and thus, it has to be seen to be believed. His giant canvases with black motifs on a white field photograph much better but it’s only “in person” that you can detect the tiny splotches of dark paint which could have been easily whited out. People often compare these paintings to Chinese calligraphy, a simile that the artist has denied, yet there is a certain Eastern “drips happen” serenity of these paintings.

For a 100-year-old artist who’s been top of his game for decades, Soulages’ personal bio is surprisingly slim and uneventful. No escapades in Tahiti, no (recorded) drunken revels, no Picasso-esque psycho-drama. Soulages has even stayed married to the same woman, Colette Llaurens, since 1940! That means an 80th wedding anniversary this year, an accomplishment in itself.

Soulages’ instant success and seamless speed towards super-stardom leads me to think of him as the anti-Van Gogh. As a journalist who has had an achingly hard time trying to get a first novel published, 80 years of success is irritatingly hard to fathom. Accepted into Paris’s prestigious Ecoles des Beaux Arts in 1937, Soulages dropped out before day one after deciding that art school had nothing to teach him. After WWII, he was rejected from one salon (count it: one) and then became the undisputed star of his next group show in 1947. By the early 1950s, he’d exhibited in the Guggenheim, the Tate, MOMA, the Phillips in Washington, as well as museums and galleries in Rio, Copenhagen, Paris, etc., and the honors and recognition never stopped.

Even though painters naturally prefer pigment to prose, Pierre Soulages is more cryptic than most. When asked about his outrenoir oeuvre in the December 2019 issue of Connaissance des Arts magazine, he replied: Le mot outrenoir permet de ne pas se limiter au phénomene optique car voir les reflets sur une surface noir, c’est un phénomene optique. (The word outrenoir makes it possible to not limit oneself to the optical phenomenon because seeing the reflections on a black surface is an optical phenomenon.)

While maddeningly opaque in both French and English, this response would make perfect sense on Dagobah: Black see you not, Luke Skywalker. Light it must have to reveal the Force.

The events of 2020 have made the world seem like one huge black hole. Is there no better time to embrace the dark and find the light that lies within it? Pierre Soulages may not be the original Jedi Knight, but his artwork is certainly what I need right now.

Musée Pierre Soulages. Jardin du Foirail, avenue Victor Hugo, 12000 Rodez. Tel: 05 65 73 82 60. Hours: 9 am to 9 pm. Closed Monday. July and August: Open 7 days. Café Michel Bras on premises.

Note: The museum re-opened after Corona lockdown on May 21st. Masks will be obligatory until further notice. Through October 31, the museum will present a temporary exhibition entitled Femmes Années 50 that showcases the abstract works of Sonia Delaunay, Joan Mitchell, Geneviève Asse, Pierrette Bloch, Shirley Goldfarb and others.

© 2020, Corinne LaBalme for France Revisited

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For most Parisians, the granite plateaus of the Aubrac—a mountainous region of central France famed for the pampered cows and sheep that flourish on its austere, volcanic terrain—is flyover country. Or a source of food.

One need only spend a few days in Paris to encounter some of the food products from the region: Aubrac steak, raw-milk Laguiole cheese and crumbly Roquefort cheese. The finest steel to cut into these gourmet delicacies is forged right next to the remote and isolated pastures from which these products come.

Folklore says that specialized cutlery was first produced in the workshops of the village of Laguiole for cowherds and shepherds in the 12th century. But the modern era of Laguiole cutlery began in 1828 when Casimir-Antoine Moulin set up the town’s first purpose-built workshop. The distinctive “Shepherd’s Cross” design on the handles—so that a knife plunged in the ground could serve as an ad hoc altar—dates from those early days. By the end of the century, the Laguiole knife it was on its way to becoming the Swiss army knife of France, with three distinct parts: a blade, a corkscrew and a trocar, a pointy surgical instrument used to pierce the stomachs of cows and sheep afflicted with deadly bloat. The addition of the corkscrew is attributed to the diaspora of the local unemployed population to Paris, where opportunities in café and restaurant businesses were developing.

The craft tradition all but disappeared in the wake of the First World War. Production was mostly just a memory when in 1985, the mayor of Laguiole sought to revive the industry, along with the help of Aubrac-bred entrepreneurs Gilbert et Jean-Louis Costes (best known for their fashion-forward Paris hotels, restaurants and cafés).

Age-old craftsmanship collides with high design at Forge de Laguiole. The new look of knifedom is embodied by the factory designed by architect Philippe Starck. Postmodern architects Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi divided commercial structures into “decorated sheds” (metal box with a prominent logos) and “ducks” (buildings where the function or product is advertised by its form, e.g. a burger joint that’s shaped like a burger), so with a 20-meter aluminum knife blade sticking out of its roof, the Forge de Laguiole fulfills both criteria.

Visitors enter through the boutique filled with showcases of dazzling steel blades accented by sleek handles fashioned from highly polished olive, juniper, cedar, ash, ebony and pistachio wood; semi-precious stone; compressed fabric, and, remarkably, varnished sand which is, amazingly, dishwasher-proof. Horn from Aubrac cattle is also used. No animals are slaughtered for their horns.

Prices begin over 100€ per knife, which may sound intimidating, but these are handmade items designed to last forever. A single knife may require days of work, and at full capacity, the Forge de Laguiole can only manufacture 200 items a day.

Visitors with tinnitus may be wise to abstain from entering the workshops, where tours and demonstrations are offered in July and August. (The boutique remains open most of the year, so off-season visitors can peek through glass windows opening onto the workshops even when there are no tours.) The hammering, polishing and sanding is so noisy that all employees wear earplugs. As might be expected in any enterprise touched by Costes sense of style, the artisans are issued hyper-chic black uniforms. Those who work in ateliers where shards of steel are flying around are decked out in metallic aprons that practically scream “Paco Rabanne.”

Almost like a feudal guild, the team spirit is tangible at Forge de Laguiole. Some employees prefer to specialize in one aspect of production while others enjoy contributing a panoply of different skills. Like Jedi knights fashioning their own light sabers, all employees, even those in administrative posts, learn to assemble a pocket knife in a rite of passage.

Once you’ve watched the welders, woodworkers and polishers at work, you’ll retreat to the boutique and examine the merchandise with even greater respect. In addition to producing traditional knives and corkscrews with the totemic bumblebee insignia (which local legend associates, apparently erroneously, with Napoleon Bonaparte’s appreciation of the town residents), Forge de Laguiole has enlisted contemporary design icons for unique cutlery. Among them, Jean-Michel Wilmotte designed knives with sleek acrylic resin handles in six fluorescent colors and Andrée Putman styled matte-finish knives with cylindrical, Art Deco-ish ebony or ash handles.

While the three-part Laguiole knife can still be found, there’s less of a call for a trocar, but modern consumers may want a specialized gourmet knife. To satisfy them, La Forge de Laguiole has worked closely with Michelin-starred chefs such as Sebastien Bras, Anne-Sophie Pic, Cyril Lignac and Gérald Passédat on specific products. This has allowed the Forge de Laguiole artisans to solve some of the thornier cutlery conundrums of the 21st century by creating, for example, a knife that can cleanly slice soft goat cheese and another for your millefeuille pastry.

There is no governmental, regional or artisanal certification connected with Laguiole knives, so at present it is perfectly legal to sell a “Laguiole” knife that was fully or partially manufactured overseas. Contrary to popular belief in many collectible sites, that bumblebee over the hinge is not a trademark guarantee. So while there’s currently no such thing as a counterfeit Laguiole, there’s a certain authenticity to have one made in the town of Laguiole.

The direction of La Forge fashions all parts of its knives on the premises and would like to see a strict regulation for regional production, as would the other Laguiole ateliers in town. Several other thriving ateliers creating both traditional and contemporary cutlery also offer tours.

Forge de Laguiole. Route de l’Aubrac, BP 9. 12210 Laguiole. Tel.: 05.65.48.43.34. La Forge de Laguiole also has boutiques in Paris (29 rue Boissy d’Anglas, 8th arr.), Toulouse (24 rue des Arts) and Rodez (3 rue Pénavayer).

Laguiole Tourist Office. Place de la Mairie, 12210 Laguiole. Tel.: 05 65 44 35 94. They also provide information about visiting the surrounding zone of Aubrac.

Food & Lodging

In Laguiole, Sebastian Bras presides over a luxury hotel complex, whose kitchen has fluctuated between two and three Michelin stars ever since his father created the now legendary gargouillou, a salad that resembles a flower arrangement. It’s one of the vegan gourmet musts of France. It may be even harder to procure a table at the family-run, roadside diner Le Relais de la Vitarelle in Montpeyroux, where Laurent Falguier’s short-but-sweet daily menu is almost sure to include tender Aubrac steak, the house charcuterie and creamy, cheese-laced Aligot mashed potatoes. LaBa Hôtel (Laguiole/Buenos Aires), has four cozy bedrooms and a tiny restaurant with a killer wine-list.

To learn about Laguiole cheese, visit the cheerful Jeune Montagne Co Op where it’s made. Marcillac is the local wine, made with the fer servadou (aka mansois) grape varietal. It’s a hearty, spicy red wine that stands up to local rustic fare.

Getting There

If you aren’t already on an exploration of the deep center of France, traveling to Laguiole is a commitment that will entail some mountain driving. The nearest city is Rodez, 33 miles southwest, capital of Aveyron, a department in the Occitania region. Setting out for Rodez from Paris by train would take some grit since it’s nearly a seven-hour ride. If looking to reach Aveyron directly from Paris, consider instead a cheerful airline named Amelia after the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, whose plane disappeared somewhere over the South Pacific in 1937, to whisk you to Rodez from Orly Airport in roughly an hour. (Rodez is home to the Soulages Museum, a destination in its own right, dedicated to the work of France’s most celebrated living artist, who turned 100 in December 2019. An article about the museum and the artist will be published soon on France Revisited.)

Alternative starting points for an approach to Laguiole are Toulouse to the southeast, Montpellier to the southwest and Clermont-Ferrand to the north. Laguiole is a 2-3-hour drive from any of those cities, though there is so many rural and small-town discoveries to be made along the way that the drive is more likely to take a few days.

© 2020, Corinne LaBalme for France Revisited.

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