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Lot # 023 L'automne 2012 - 1ère session Live auction Jean Paul Lemieux CC QMG RCA 1904 - 1990 Canadian Montréal l'hiver oil on canvas signed, dated 1965 and inscribed "M" and on verso titled on the exhibition labels and on the canvas edge 12 3/4 x 61 1/2 pouces 32.4 x 156.2cm Provenance: Acquired directly from the Artist by the present Private Collection, Montreal Référence: Anne Hébert, Jean Paul Lemieux, Ministère des Affaires culturelles du Québec, 1974, reproduced page 47 Guy Robert, Lemieux, 1975, reproduced page 182 Exposition: Musée du Québec, Jean Paul Lemieux, 1974, traveling to Moscow, Leningrad, Prague and Paris, 1974 - 1975, catalogue #33 At first sight, Montréal l’hiver (Winter in Montreal) seems like a very unusual Lemieux. Instead of his customary scene with an isolated person in the foreground before a vast country landscape, or a faraway city (“la villelointaine”), we are in the middle of a city with a multitude of people, as if some unexpected event has forced everyone down into the street. Lemieux, who said that he was fascinated by the idea of “a completely deserted city”, seems here to be attracted by the exact opposite: a city so populated that it leaves no room for cars, buses or other means of transportation. This is a city where buildings and walls are reduced to a simple background without doors or windows; a city which consists of a crowd of warmly dressed people who are not communicating with each other but are just standing there, with just a few walking in one direction or the other. There is even the feeling of a snapshot in the image - such as in the device of a person leaving the frame on the extreme right. Certainly the title suggests a specific place - Montreal - and a specific time - the winter season. But we could be in any great northern city such as Moscow or Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), where the painting was shown in 1974. We are brought together with people of all ages - for instance, a young boy stands in the middle foreground with an old lady on his left, and to his right a woman who could be his mother. But on the other hand, all these faces are rather expressionless, each one lost in their own inner world. The more you look at the painting, the more you are struck by the constructed nature of the whole scene, as if Lemieux had proceeded by addition. Starting with an image of an isolated child standing in front of an undifferentiated background (a typical Lemieux tableau), he seemed compelled little by little to fill the empty surroundings with one more person, then another and another…..and ended up with this crowd. Lemieux is always more comfortable depicting a specific time than a place, and there is no doubt that the overcast sky that we see far in the background is a winter sky. Similarly, Lemieux is more at ease in suggesting the age of his people rather than their expression. We are, in fact, in front of an abstraction which is less a particular city than a generalized city; rather than recognizable buildings, it is like a backdrop; rather than real people interacting among themselves, it is more like a crowd of random juxtaposed people. The very elongated format (more than a meter and a half long), the subtle range of colours (grey, brick red, ochre and brown) and the suggestion of near and far spaces bring us even more into abstraction, at least in a purely formal sense. The paradox is that Lemieux is never more abstract than when he seems anecdotal; never more timeless than when he seems instantaneous; never more universal than when he claims to depict a specific place and a specific time. These formal qualities were certainly responsible in the middle of the sixties - a period particularly strong for abstract painting in Quebec – for the intense attraction his painting exerted at the time. Those same qualities also explain why his paintings can still speak to us today. Their timelessness and their universality give them a peculiar power. They are haunting, like a scene seen in a dream but without being nightmarish, real and unreal at the same time, their ultimate significance as mysterious as their appearance. Clearly, the uniqueness of Montréal l’hiver is more apparent than real; the essential characteristics of Lemieux’s work are all there, and the work resonates in our consciousness. We thank François-Marc Gagnon of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute of Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, for contributing the above essay.
Tous les prix sont en dollars canadiens. Nous avons fait en sorte d'assurer l'exactitude de l'information affichée, mais des erreurs ou oublis peuvent se produire. Toute acquisition est soumise à nos modalités et conditions. |
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