Sold for: $337,250

PROVENANCE
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Private Collection, USA
By descent to the present Private Collection, USA

LITERATURE
Georges Duthuit et al., Riopelle: Paintings, Pastels, Assemblages, Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1969, reproduced page 15 and listed page 32
Canadian Art Today (London), 1970, reproduced page v
Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, Online Addendum Volume 4, 1966 - 1971, http://www.riopelle.ca/

EXHIBITED
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, Riopelle: Paintings, Pastels, Assemblages, 1969

Jean Paul Riopelle’s already towering reputation continues to grow. In December of 2021, it was announced that the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec will build a pavilion dedicated to the Quebec artist’s work. As we will see when this facility opens, in a career as long, productive and successful as Riopelle’s, it is more than a convenience to perceive different periods, with evolving emphases and qualities in works produced at a given time. “Classic” Riopelle – if we may use such a term for a radical artist – refers to the 1950s, after he had moved to Paris and consolidated his dramatic, painterly style. In the 1940s, he was part of the Montreal avant-garde, motivated by Surrealism, Paul-Émile Borduas and the anti-establishment cultural manifesto Refus global (1948). Riopelle returned permanently to Quebec in 1972 and painted there until his death in 2002. Images inspired by the Arctic are important in this later phase of his work.

Riopelle’s paintings of the 1960s, including Pour ne pas voir choir les roses d’automne from 1968, developed in the context of his worldwide recognition by this time, which included showing at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1951 and 1955, in the Younger European Painters exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1953, and at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1962. Reflecting on signing the Refus global two decades earlier in a 1968 Radio-Canada TV interview, Riopelle emphasized that it was “written by Borduas…to reject those conditions, both material and intellectual, that had been our lot up to that point.”[1] He and others central to the School of Paris reformed those conditions over 20 years. By the 1960s, he had also successfully navigated the endless comparisons between European and American abstraction in the 1950s and was celebrated in France, the USA and Canada. Pour ne pas voir choir les roses d’automne was sold in New York by the quintessential transatlantic art dealer Pierre Matisse, with whom Riopelle had worked since the early 1950s. Little wonder that a confident creativity emanates from this canvas.

The work demonstrates Riopelle’s characteristic and always appealing vibrancy of colour and exuberant movement of pigment within the frame. We easily sense the hand and indeed, the whole body that drives the paint into its organized frenzy, yet with Riopelle, the forms and colours seem independent, animated from within. We are party to their dynamism as we look; we imagine that they will continue when we depart. Riopelle eschews the literal. His titles are mere suggestions, associations, reactions. Nonetheless, “So as not to see the autumn roses fall” could suggest holding on to the prismatic saturation of a fall garden in France, where he lived at the time. The painting almost coalesces into a figure on a background as we note the central forms’ upward thrust, yet we see and feel a mood, not a scene per se. Much influenced by Claude Monet’s late water lilies, Riopelle viewed nature and the art of painting as change.

We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, for contributing the above essay. Cheetham is the author of two books on abstract art: The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting and Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the 60s.

1. Quoted in Gilbert Érouart, Riopelle in Conversation, trans. Donald Winkler (Concord, ON: House of Anansi, 1995), 71.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars