PROVENANCE
Lacerte art contemporain, Quebec City and Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal
Private Collection, Toronto

This nocturnal landscape, which has the qualities of an oil sketch, shows a lit field crossed to the right by a young woman dressed in a ballgown. With her shoulders bare, she lets a black stole slip from her left hand, and it brushes the ground studded with white flowers under a sky glittering with stars. In the distance, darker shapes suggest islands or mountains on the sloping line of the horizon.

A romantic work, Le bal has the characteristics that contributed to the success of Jean Paul Lemieux, who became one of Canada’s most famous figurative painters in the mid-1960s. The uncluttered space of his paintings highlights the human figure confronted, in its solitude, with the immensity of nature. The late Marie Carani noted the close relationship between the works of Lemieux and Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840), including the former’s attachment to “Northern Romanticism with its more dramatic lighting, most likely to symbolically disguise its images of the natural world.”[1]

An air of mystery and an intense communion with the natural elements emanate from this allegorical scene, where the character evolves in a metaphorical space. Its organization is reduced to two rectangular masses that are stacked atop one another. The surface is enlivened by expressive matter that the painter has applied so finely to the support that it reveals the grain of the canvas. The contrast of light and dark is subtly rendered in blue-green shades on the ground and in the anthracite grey of the sky. Finally, the painter punctuated the space with tiny white dots that unify the two pictorial fields: flowers and stars shine with intensity in their respective areas.

There are still several works by Lemieux whose provenance remains unclear. Thanks to the sales inventory carefully kept by the artist’s wife, Madeleine Des Rosiers, from 1965 to 1980, it is possible to trace works that have remained in the shadows and silence of private collections. Mme Des Rosiers’s document specifies the date of sale accompanied by a short description: it includes the original titles of works that have been lost over time, often replaced by descriptive or even fanciful titles, as was the case with Le bal, which dates from 1966 and was given the number 66.15.

We thank Michèle Grandbois, author of Jean Paul Lemieux au Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, for contributing the above essay, translated from the French. This work will be included in Grandbois’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

1. Marie Carani, “L’Effet Jean Paul Lemieux, 1904–1990,” in Jean Paul Lemieux (Quebec City: Musée du Québec, 1992), exhibition catalogue, 241.

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