Sold for: $43,250

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Douglas Udell Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Guy Robert, Pellan: Sa vie et son oeuvre / His Life and His Art, 1963, pages 16 and 18

The power of my friend Pellan is from the interior lamps of the spirit.

—André Breton, French Surrealist

During his studies in Paris, beginning in 1926, Alfred Pellan absorbed influences from artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Vincent van Gogh and Max Ernst. Upon his return to Canada in 1940, he injected fresh energy into the Montreal scene, dealing a blow to conservative academicism. He founded the group Prisme d’Yeux in 1948; its manifesto proclaimed its diversity of style and freedom from Automatism, which dominated the Montreal scene at the time.

Angoisse is an outstanding example of Pellan’s work, colourful, surreal and mysterious, in which, as Guy Robert wrote, “Magic forms charged with an excess of poetic energy awaken, ripen and burst, following their fascinating course.” Pellan was a master draughtsman; here his strong lines provide integration of form and colour, and through their arabesques, create rhythm. Angoisse mean anguish, and the woman in the tableau seems to breathe out strange numbers, surrounded by shapes that suggest the processes of her psyche, while in the background, a staircase to the sun implies hope.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars