Soulages Museum
Soulages Museum
Aubrac is situated on the plateau that flows into the Lot valley. Via the towns of Espalion and Bozouls, one reaches in less than an hour the Soulages museum in the city of Rodez. The Soulages Museum is one of the last national museums built, and the only one dedicated to the work of a living painter whose centenary was celebrated at the end of 2019. An unusual building in the Aveyron landscape, composed of an assembly of massive, opaque blocks of corten steel, almost overhanging the Ruthenian peak, the museum, designed by the internationally renowned Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes (winner in 2017 of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest international distinction in the field of architecture), was inaugurated by President François Hollande in 2014.
It features a collection of masterworks by Pierre Soulages. Not only works from the youth years of the painter from Aveyron, who is also the best known living French painter abroad, with works that bear witness to the training of the young artist in the landscapes that today form the horizon around the museum that bears his name, but also large formats from the artist’s full maturity, as well as the preparatory work for the design and production of the stained glass windows of the Abbey of Sainte-Foy, in Conques, a major site on the Way of St. James or Camino de Santiago. The museum displays prints by the master of the rue Combarelle, and opened a room, first wanted and then demanded by the artist to the nearest square metre (i.e. 500 square metres), dedicated to temporary exhibitions of leading figures in both modern art as well as contemporary artists.
In the museum’s great standing complex, you will find a bookshop and, for food and refreshments, Café Bras opened by Michel Bras, the internationally renowned chef based on the Aubrac, in Laguiole. A few steps away from the museum, you will find a cinema and the splendid 12th century cathedral Cathédrale Notre-Dame of Rodez.
