Vendu pour : 409 500 $

PROVENANCE
Galerie Agnès Lefort, Montreal
A Prominent Montreal Family Estate
Sold sale of Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 15, 2013, lot 51
Private Collection, Vancouver

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Barbara Rose, Readings in American Art since 1900: A Documentary Survey, 1968, page 155

Sans titre shows a remarkable control of the gesture. One of the small drawings from 1959 done on Gitanes cigarette packages (see catalogue raisonné #2005-1397) seems to be the preparatory sketch for this painting, and is also quite close to Composition no. 27, 1959 (see catalogue raisonné #2005-1378) but more free-handed. It belongs to a series of well-known calligraphic paintings that play on the cross motif, as in Composition 44, 1959, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Abstraction in Blue, 1959, at The Art Gallery of Ontario. Here, the pictorial space is crossed by three movements from top to bottom and bottom to top. It is, of course, a work like this one that has given the idea of a rapprochement with Franz Kline’s painting. But as much as this Borduas painting is more calligraphic – almost Japanese in its inspiration – it must be distinguished from Kline, who rejected the idea of his own painting being calligraphic. “You don’t make the letter ‘C’,” wrote Kline, “and then fill the white in the circle. When people describe forms of painting in the calligraphic sense they really mean...the design of black against a form of white.” Borduas would not have had any qualms in describing his paintings as calligraphic, especially since he was dreaming of visiting Japan after his stay in Paris.

Now what about the story of this painting? It was presented to us as being titled and dated on the back as Antagonismes, 29/1/1960. In fact, that is inscribed on the stretcher, but the writing is not Borduas’s. We believe that Antagonismes is not the title of the painting, but the name of the exhibition where it was presented in February 1960, the month of Borduas’s death in Paris. Antagonismes took place at the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris and a catalogue was published. A Borduas painting is reproduced in this catalogue, but it is not our painting. It is rather a painting that belonged to Robert Élie, a close friend of Borduas, and which is now in the hands of a Montreal collector. It is quite possible that Borduas changed his mind at the last minute (January 29, 1960 was the eve of the opening of the show) and decided to exhibit this more recent and more vibrant painting than the one belonging to Élie. But then the catalogue was already printed and there was no way to reproduce the actual painting presented by Borduas - our Sans titre, 1959. I admit this is all a little speculative but it is not the only example known of a painting reproduced in a catalogue that was replaced at the last minute by a better and more significant one.

It remains that this is a remarkable painting, a rare event when we think that very few black and white paintings of the Parisian period have been seen recently on the market, and none dated so late, so close to Borduas’s death. The work of Borduas shows a constant progress from his early Automatist paintings to these last black and white paintings. Borduas always felt the need to renew himself. In Paris, he was attracted by the more advanced ideas, like Lucio Fontana’s slashed paintings or Yves Klein’s monochrome painting and monochord music performances. Borduas kept his own style, but remained open to what was happening in the art world around him, both in New York and in Paris.

We thank François-Marc Gagnon of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute of Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, for contributing the above essay.

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