Emmanuel Macron recalled that the life of the artist, who died on October 26 at the age of 102, had been marked with the seal of black, during a sober ceremony in the square courtyard, Wednesday 2 November .
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The sun’s rays have slowly eclipsed. The cold gradually seized the audience. As if he could not be otherwise on the day of the national funeral of Pierre Soulages, who died on October 26, at the age of 102 years. Wednesday, November 2, Emmanuel Macron paid a sober tribute but felt the French artist in the square courtyard of the Louvre, where Georges Braque, Le Corbusier and André Malraux were entitled, before him, to Lauriers whose homeland surrounded the front of his heroes.
The republican solemnity Sied in Soulages which spanned two centuries and acquired, by its longevity and its perseverance, a stature of commander. “There is no French artist who has had such a great influence as him, if not Christian Boltanski,” said Eric de Chassey, Director General of the National Institute of Art History (INHA). No other example in the history of art, he added, “that this long and concentrated journey, that of a painter who has remained contemporary until the end while having the sense of total continuity with the art of the past “. And which place more appropriate to make him a procession than the prestigious Parisian museum, which had devoted an exhibition in 2019 to him.
“Le Louvre is the house of painters, where Soulages went the first time he came to Paris, he was a very beautiful symbol”, greeted Alfred Pacing, the former director from the National Museum of Modern Art, which was curator of the Soulages at the Louvre exhibition. 2> a funeral walk at the Drum
Several hundred personalities had been invited to this ceremony, inaugurated by a funeral walk at the step of a drum and completed by a quartet of Jean-Sébastien Bach played by the Republican Guard orchestra. We recognized, in the Assembly, some former ministers of culture and the current one, Rima Abdul Malak, the Keeper of the Seals, Eric Dupond-Moretti, the Belgian designer Philippe Geluck, the architect Jean Nouvel, the director of the Foundation Vuitton, Suzanne Pagé, and collector François Pinault. Without forgetting the former president of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, and his successor, Laurence des Cars. But also the collector Jean-Claude Marian, founder of the Orpea Ehpads group, whose shoc Les Fossoyeurs de Victor Castanet had denounced the breaches.
The crowd of the curious and anonymous people who came to make their last farewells was not as compact as that which had massaged in 1976 to pay tribute to André Malraux. “The courtyard was much more crowded,” recalls Marc Boisseuil, who had attended it. For nothing in the world, the photographer would have missed the tribute to Pierre Soulages, “a huge artist, a great classic”. “Yes it was a big one !, Rebounds Marivon C., an artist who came specially from Chamonix (Haute-Savoie). I saw all his exhibitions, at the Louvre, at the Center Pompidou, at the Gianadda Foundation, I all have his books! “
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