Sold for: $351,000

PROVENANCE
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, stock #3724
Gallery Moos Ltd., Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Yseult Riopelle, Jean-Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, Volume II, 1954 - 1959, 2004, reproduced page 292, catalogue #1958.043H.1958

Few Canadian artists have received such sustained and high praise from provincial, national and international institutions as Jean-Paul Riopelle did during his illustrious career. Riopelle enjoyed an abundance of national and international awards and exhibitions and witnessed the placement of his work in prominent private and public collections. He did ‘everything’. A pupil of Paul-Émile Borduas in Montreal in the 1940s, he was a signatory to the manifesto Refus Global (1948), Canada’s most famous and influential proclamation of aesthetic and cultural liberty. He was a prominent member of the pivotal avant-garde group ‘Les Automatistes’ before moving to France in 1947. There he became part of the Surrealist circle, and was the only Canadian to exhibit with them in a significant 1947 exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. Riopelle participated in the Venice Biennale in both 1954 and 1962. In 1990 he permanently settled in Quebec, where he remained active until his death in 2002.

Though À claire-voie was part of this transatlantic competition - a strong statement of European vigour at a crucial time - its vitality comes from Riopelle’s signature emphasis within the arena of painting rather than art world politics. His bold application of pigment builds up an impasto surface that reflects light in myriad ways; its irrepressibly vibrant palette compels the eye. Riopelle was consciously inspired by Claude Monet’s late Water Lilies series, painted well into the twentieth century we should recall, and thus much closer chronologically to Riopelle’s efforts in abstraction than we might think. What is more, Riopelle took up residence in Giverny, Monet’s fabled site for this work. “I lived where he lived,” Riopelle stated in an interview, “exactly.”

Paintings such as À claire-voie made Riopelle’s reputation as a leading artist of French Lyrical Abstraction, of tachisme, and informel, all descriptions that opposed an expressive, unbridled freedom to the hard-edged, geometrical tendencies increasingly prevalent in both American Colour Field painting of the time and the generations of Montreal abstractionists known as the Plasticiens. Riopelle bridged the increasingly wide and fractious gap between post-World War II European and American abstract painting. Abroad, he was seen as much as a French and specifically Parisian artist as a Canadian, yet by showing with the famous Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City from 1954 on, Riopelle underwrote that gallery’s explicit mandate to reintroduce what was then contemporary European art to an increasingly dominant American context.

Categories and history aside, it is remarkable how immediate this painting looks today. As in the intimacies of Monet’s late works so admired by Riopelle, or the decorative patterns of Édouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse that he also cites as precedents, here too we can happily lose ourselves in the intricacies and surprising juxtapositions of hue, texture and gesture that enliven the surface of À claire-voie. While the painting remains assuredly abstract, individual passages to which the eye might be drawn provide nothing less than narratives of painterly passion. There are stories to see in the layers and movements of paint, in the striking juxtapositions of colour and in the emphatic deployment of stark black and white. Prolonged looking from a greater distance suggests that the welter of activity laid down by Riopelle’s palette knife is to a considerable extent controlled pictorially. The intense activity of a large central area is compressed, bounded by smoother, calmer forms around its perimeter. Painting is in fact framed by painting.

We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, for contributing the above essay.

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