Pierre Soulages, Outrenoir

It is most refreshing when a young 92-year old man speaks up against those who make pompous predictions about the “end of the profession” and defends the freedom of contemporary art … In this dialogue published some ten years ago and updated, the artist the French most love (500 000 visitors during his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2010-2011), obviously talks about his art, about his premature recognition by the USA (as of the 1940s), about the genesis of Outrenoirs in 1979, about the 104 glass roofs of the abbey of Conques and the invention by the engineers of Saint-Gobain of a glass to be found nowhere else, “ which lets light go through but which the eye cannot see through ”. But he takes many round’about ways to talk about rugby, about wine growing (he was a wine grower for a short time during the war), about Montaigne, certain models of Chinese paintbrushes or the golds of Cimabue. A beautiful lesson of open-mindedness and anti-sectarianism…

• Pierre Soulages, Outrenoir, entretiens avec Françoise Jaunin, La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2012, 216 p., €15.