Sold for: $25,000

PROVENANCE
Galerie d’Art Michel Bigué, Quebec
Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary
By descent to the present Private Collection, Calgary

LITERATURE
Robert Bernier et al., Riopelle, des visions d'Amérique, 1997, reproduced page 95
Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 2, 1954 - 1959, 2004, reproduced page 381, catalogue #1956.020P.V1956
Michel Martin et al., Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation / Un couple dans la démesure, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2018, pages 22 and 28

The 2017 to 2018 exhibition Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation / Un couple dans la démesure, at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Art Gallery of Ontario, demonstrated the connection between the work produced by Joan Mitchell and Jean Paul Riopelle in the mid-1950s. They met in 1954 in Paris, and the collision was monumental. Michel Martin wrote that as “painters of great passion, lovers and accomplices, but also rivals, Joan Mitchell and Jean Paul Riopelle formed for almost twenty-five years an unconventional couple.” There are strong similarities between their works on paper in the mid-1950s. In 1958, Mitchell wrote to Riopelle, “Last night I painted eight pictures on paper…some very grey and dark [that] had an influence of someone I know in Paris – including a palette knife.” That person in Paris was, of course, Riopelle, whose lyrical abstractions on paper she was thinking of, bold and gestural works such as this.

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