[4] Pierre was raised by his older sister Antoinette and their mother, Aglaé Zoé Julie (Corp) Soulages.

[6] As a child, he was interested in the area's menhirs,[4] in Celtic carvings in the local museum, and also in the Romanesque architecture of the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques.

[7] Inspired by the art of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, Soulages began studies at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, but soon dropped out because he was disappointed by the traditional style.

[7] He opened a studio in Courbevoie, Paris, painting in "complete abstraction", with black as the dominant colour, and experimenting with walnut oil.

He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954,[3] and in New York City the same year,[10] gaining recognition in the United States.

[11] From 1987 to 1994, he produced 104 stained-glass windows for the Abbey of Sainte-Foy in Conques,[12] prepared by around 700 tests at a small factory near Münster, Germany.

[7]Soulages was the first living artist to have been invited to exhibit at the state Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg and later with the Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow (2001).

[13] In 2007, the Musée Fabre of Montpellier devoted an entire room to Soulages, presenting a donation he made to the city.

A retrospective was held at the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou from October 2009 to March 2010.

[9] In 2014, Soulages presented fourteen recent works in his first American exhibition in 10 years, at Dominique Lévy and Galerie Perrotin, New York.

In September 2019, the Lévy Gorvy Gallery in New York held a major exhibition[16] ahead of the retrospective at the Louvre Museum in December celebrating his 100th birthday.

The texture that is then produced either absorbs or rejects light, breaking up the surface of the painting by disrupting the uniformity of the black.

[21][22] He often used bold cuts in vertical and horizontal lines, the crevasses and forms created by using angles and contours.

[7] 17 December 1966 from 1966, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art demonstrates the artist's boldly brushed black on white canvases.