Sold for: $21,240

PROVENANCE
Galerie l'Actuelle, Montreal
Guido Molinari, Montreal, acquired from the above September 12, 1955
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
François-Marc Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas, National Gallery of Canada, 1976, page 23, reproduced page 64
François-Marc Gagnon, Borduas and America / Borduas et l'Amérique, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1977, pages 16, 36 and 51
P. Malkin, "Borduas and America," Vanguard, Vol. 6, December 1977 - January 1978, pages 9 and 10
François-Marc Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas (1905 - 1960), Biographie critique et analyse de l'oeuvre, 1978, pages 362 and 387
René Payant, "The Tenacity of the Sign: Borduas in New York," artscanada, Vol. 224/225, December 1978 - January 1979, page 34
François-Marc Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1988, page 374
François-Marc Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas: A Critical Biography, 2013, page 346, reproduced page 347, catalogue #19.2

EXHIBITED
Galerie l'Actuelle, Montreal, Aquarelles récentes, Borduas, October 25 - November 8, 1955, catalogue #3
Vancouver Art Gallery, Borduas and America / Borduas et l'Amérique, December 9, 1977 - January 8, 1978, catalogue #67
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Paul-Émile Borduas, May 6 - September 11, 1988, traveling to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1988, catalogue #112

In 1954, Paul-Émile Borduas was in New York, and he produced two waves of watercolours in the spring and fall of that year. Gerbes légères (Light Sheaves) is an outstanding example of this body of work. Borduas expert François-Marc Gagnon confirmed Borduas’s interest in the Abstract Expressionists Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock at that time, noting that “his contemporaneous watercolours were strikingly influenced by them.” Directly referring to Gerbes légères and two other works that use a dripping technique, Gagnon wrote, “All these works substitute a cluster of trajectories and droplets for the frozen branching structures of the preceding watercolours, as if the image of an ionized atom in a state of excitation had replaced that of organic growth. Notably, however, the matter here transformed into energy retains something of the arrangement of particles around a nucleus...distributed in easily discernible packets (quanta), as if a force of attraction still retained the energy released around some invisible central core.”

This work is included in François-Marc Gagnon's online catalogue raisonné of the artist's work at http://www.borduas.concordia.ca//fr/catalog/all?page=3, #2005-1084.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars