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LOT 023

AANFM ARCA OC QMG
1928 - 2021
Canadian

Reflet d'Eden
oil on canvas
signed and dated 1961 and on verso titled on the gallery label and inscribed "ECP"
60 x 65 1/2 in, 152.4 x 166.4 cm

Estimate: $100,000 - $150,000 CAD

Sold for: $451,250

Preview at:

PROVENANCE
Dorothy Cameron Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik, Rita Letendre: Fire & Light, Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017, page 20


Rita Letendre was introduced to Paul-Émile Borduas by fellow Quebec artist Jean-Paul Mousseau after she left the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, and she was immediately taken by Borduas’s belief in painting as a form of expression and self-discovery. Borduas was similarly impressed with Letendre’s work, and she was included in the final Automatists exhibition in 1954. Following the dissolution of the Automatists, Letendre would take on Borduas’s idea of the act of painting as affirmation, and she would continually evolve through the 1950s, comfortably occupying the spaces arising between the non-figurative movements that crackled through Montreal. During this period, Letendre would move from painting Borduas-inflected figure / ground geometries to quasi-Plasticien structures to dense, narrow grids, all the while maintaining her distinct voice characterized by a balance between orderly compositional arrangements and lyrical improvisation, thick impasto and illuminated colour.

It was in 1961 that Letendre would move to perhaps her most robust series of paintings, which would absorb her focus for the next three years. In the paintings she produced in this period, Letendre developed an exuberantly expressive language of abstraction, distinguished by thickly applied impasto, gestural blurs of movement and expansive flashes of colour against broad, stormy grounds. These works retain the rough cardinality of the grid - the play between horizontality and verticality expressed in centralized calligraphic forms across turbulent bands - that defined her earlier practice, while presupposing the dynamism, force, and flashing light effects of the hard-edged works she would go on to paint in the late 1960s.

This exceptional canvas was painted in a pivotal period for Letendre, immediately before an extended European trip that would precipitate her turn towards hard-edged abstraction, and it represents a culmination of the artist’s development up until that point. The paint is applied in gestural strokes to create expansive, weighty volumes. A blackened cruciform breaks through a field of dark green. Blazes of orange and sparks of white glint through the darkness, while brilliant blue flags shine through the cascading surface. The overall impression is something chaotic, almost organic: tremors of energy vibrate out from the conflicts between green and black, while volcanic eruptions of brighter colour surge out from the fractures, creating an urgent interplay between interior and exterior energies. The choice of the title Reflet d’Eden suggests not an image of paradise, but perhaps its tempestuous mirror, or the seething collision of primordial energies at the creation of the world.

This work was offered through the Dorothy Cameron Gallery in Toronto and was painted a year before Letendre’s first solo exhibition outside of Montreal, held at Cameron’s Here and Now Gallery in Toronto in 1962. Cameron championed new and unknown artists from across Canada, with a special interest in artists from the West and from Quebec. By the early 1960s, Letendre became more interested in her Indigenous heritage, building on Borduas’s earlier encouragement to use self-discovery as a productive force. Throughout her career Letendre resisted reductive interpretations read through her identity as an Indigenous woman, feeling constrained by the way her work was written about through this lens. Wanda Nanibush has offered a more nuanced view, noting that her heritage influenced her because “it’s part of her spirit, even while that’s not all that goes into her work. For instance, Letendre maintains that her taste for striking contrasts between bright or warm colours and stark blacks has its source in her Abenaki heritage.” A commitment to the process of self-discovery is readily evoked in Letendre’s formal experimentations and their dynamic, emotive results. In a career marked by constant renewal, this painting stands as a phenomenal example of the artist’s work during a crucial period.

The exhibition Rita Letendre: Eternal Space took place at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University Long Beach from February 12 to March 26, 2022. This show was presented in conjunction with the completion of restoration on Letendre’s large-scale 1965 mural Sunforce, which was commissioned for the University of California.


Estimate: $100,000 - $150,000 CAD

All prices are in Canadian Dollars


Although great care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information posted, errors and omissions may occur. All bids are subject to our Terms and Conditions of Business. Bidders must ensure they have satisfied themselves with the condition of the Lot prior to bidding. Condition reports are available upon request.