BERLIN.- Pierre Soulages is one of the world’s foremost abstract painters of recent decades. On the occasion of his 90th birthday he is being honoured by a retrospective in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Starting on 2 October 2010 Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau will be showing this exhibition in an altered form. Over 70 pictures of all his creative periods, from the works with walnut stain (1947 to 1949) to the radically black paintings of recent years measuring up three metres high, are being shown, many of them for the first time in Germany. They illustrate the dynamic artistic development of this most famous of contemporary French artists. Born on 24 December 1919 in Rodez, a small town located to the north of and roughly equidistant from Toulouse und Montpellier, Pierre Soulages refused to train at the “Ecole nationale superieure des beaux arts” in Paris, being out of sympathy with what he saw as that insti