The french abstract painter Pierre Soulages, who is not only considered his country’s leading living artist but is almost a national hero, is still producing critically acclaimed work at age 89. His upcoming 90th birthday is being celebrated with a series of shows and displays. The Centre Pompidou is mounting a retrospective that runs from October 14 through March 8, 2010, tracing the 60-year evolution of the painter’s concentration on black through more than 100 important pictures, from the rare brou de noix ("walnut stain") works on paper and goudron sur verre ("tar on glass") pieces of the late 1940s and a restrained selection of his popular, powerful expressionist 1950s and ’60s paintings to his lesser-known outrenoir ("beyond black") 1979-to-2009 canvases, many of them straight from his atelier. The Musée du Louvre, meanwhile, is displaying one of Soulages’s recent works from October 18 through January 18, 2010, next to Paolo Uccello’s 15th-century Battle of San Romano. And four gallery shows — three in Paris, one in London — will keep the party alive well into spring 2010.

Soulages was born in 1919 in the town of Rodez, in Southern France, and as a child was attracted to the town’s Romanesque architecture as well as the prehistoric cave paintings of the surrounding region. Demobilized from the army in 1941, he spent the years until France’s liberation studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, where he met his wife, Colette. After moving, in 1946, to Paris, Soulages began painting gestural abstract compositions seriously, with walnut stain on paper in the 1940s and, by the ’50s, in oil on canvas. In the process he emerged as one of the major figures of the postwar Second School of Paris abstractionists, along with Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Serge Poliakoff and Jean-Paul Riopelle.

Soulages has stood aloof from such classifications as lyrical abstraction, Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism. He identifies his works only as Peinture or Composition together with its measurements and date of creation. Integral to all his output is an obsession with light reflected by black. Soulages would lay down backgrounds of white or luminous layers of blue, yellow, red, orange or brown, overpainting this with thick barlike forms in black that he scraped away using brushes, trowels or palette knives to reveal streaks or patches of the underlying light and color.

Similarities with the calligraphic style of the New York School painter Franz Kline led to controversial comparisons by some New York art critics of Kline’s influence on Soulages. These assertions were refuted by Soulages’s dealer Samuel Kootz, who observed that his innovations predated Kline’s.

Soulages’s works of the 1950s, with their bold, black brushstrokes, marked him as an original and are now his most sought-after. Their prices have been rising steadily since a July 2006 sale at Sotheby’s Paris where Sans titre, 1959, from an important private collection (est. €300-400,000; $384-515,000), rocketed to €1.2 million ($1.5 million). This was the artist’s first work to crack a million euros. "That sale completely changed the market for Soulages," says Grégoire Billault, Sotheby’s Paris vice president and director of contemporary art. "For the first time, the interest was international. We counted 17 bidders from three continents: Europe, North America and Asia." Billault attributes the record price, paid by a European buyer, to "the painting’s big size, right year, perfect provenance, immaculate condition and special light."

In December 2007, Soulages’s Peinture 125 x 202, a blue and black oil on canvas from 1959, sold for €1.5 million ($2.2 million) at the Versailles auction house Perrin, Royère, Lajeunesse. His record in euros was achieved in December 2008 at Sotheby’s Paris by Peinture 21 juillet 1958 (130 cm x 162.1 cm), an alluring composition in blue, black and white on a yellow background that a European bidder won for €1.5 million ($1.9 million).