Dedicated with love to Colette Soulages, Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight (2023) honored the lasting influence of the esteemed French master just before the one-year anniversary of his passing. Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight traversed seven decades of the artist’s practice and invited viewers to join his exploration of light and darkness. The exhibition’s title captures a phrase penned on Soulages’s work by James Johnson Sweeney, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1935–46) and director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1952–60), who illuminated the artist’s oeuvre in the United States through significant exhibitions and writing.

Lévy Gorvy Dayan developed this exhibition in collaboration with Colette Soulages and Alfred Pacquement, president of Musée Soulages in Rodez, France, and former director of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The retrospective spanned multiple floors of the gallery’s landmark 1932 Beaux Arts-style townhouse inspired by the 18th-century Hôtel de Wailly in Paris and designed by architect Horace Trumbauer. It was a tribute to Soulages’s enduring oeuvre, focused on his prominence in America and the dialogue between his work and artistic developments in the United States. The exhibition featured, in turn, acclaimed paintings from the 1950s and ’60s, critical 1970s canvases, and examples of the artist’s revelatory Outrenoir series created between 1980 and 2019. A noteworthy group of works on paper from the Musée Soulages, spanning 1995 to 2000, revealed the pure contrast of black and white—and a return to his use of walnut stain (Brou de noix) as Soulages continued his experimentation with light.