Les entrailles de Prométhée is emblematic of a brief and transformative period in Rita Letendre’s painting career in the early 1960s, in which she asserted the most powerful versions of her explosive gestural abstraction. Letendre began her artistic training in the highly regimented and conservative environment of the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. The school proved restrictive of Letendre’s artistic aspirations, persuading her to leave in the early 1950s and follow Paul-Émile Borduas and the Automatists, who sought to break with the representational dogmas that the École des beaux-arts enforced. Letendre would spend the next decade developing her own abstract language in close concert with the Montreal avant-garde, applying overlapping gestural geometric shapes tiled in loosely gridded compositions, echoing an all-over patterning reminiscent of her Automatist peers and mentors.

Beginning in the early 1960s, there was a clear shift in Letendre’s approach as her canvases became larger, likely inspired by the visionary American Abstract Expressionists including Franz Kline, with whom Letendre had a particular affinity. To meet the demands of her new scale, she would abandon her tiled patterning for more centripetal and rapturous compositions with jagged-edged planes of colour intruding into a black background. She applied the paint energetically and generously with a spatula, creating impasto riptides and waves that swirled and whipped off the surface of the canvas.

During this period, Letendre developed an interest in her Indigenous Abenaki family lineage and frequently looked to Mexican and pre-Columbian art for inspiration, inviting deep natural history and cosmic unrest into her painted expressions. The results of her self-discovery in paint resonated with critics, with Elizabeth Kilbourn noting that Letendre’s paintings “[seem] to have emerged from a witch’s cauldron, redolent with powerful images and turbulent paint.”

Les entrailles de Prométhée is an exceptional example from Letendre’s oeuvre that embodies the restless energy and operatic ambition of her most innovative period. In the vertically oriented composition, fiery mixtures of red and orange with flecks of green surround a primordial black ground, encroaching on or being subsumed by the central void. White swipes of paint seem to float above the tar-like areas on the central axis, like flakes of ash tossing in gusts of hot air above a gaping volcanic crater. Letendre typically added titles after completing her paintings, and she associated this work with the Greek myth of Prometheus, a Titan punished by the gods of Athens for bringing fire, technology and civilization to humanity. He was bound to a rock where his liver was eaten by an eagle, embodying the god Zeus, only for the organ to regenerate overnight, allowing the punishment to repeat indefinitely.

Through her subtle references to subject matter and organic, gestural brushwork, Letendre translates these mythic energies of creation and discovery into her vibrant abstract compositions. While modern painting tended towards flatness and atemporality, Letendre’s work from the early 1960s ushered in a new synthesis, drawing inspiration from her Indigenous heritage and inviting the energies of natural history, emotional turmoil and epic drama into the lexicon of her abstractions.