PROVENANCE
Galerie Agnès Lefort, Montreal
Galerie Claude Lafitte, Montreal
Galerie Dresdnere, Toronto
Canadian Art and International Works, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 9, 1995, lot 90
Private Collection, Vancouver
Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 27, 2015, lot 25
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912, page 25
“Borduas et Riopelle Chez Agnès Lefort,” La Presse, September 25, 1965, page 23
François-Marc Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas (1905 – 1950): Biographie critique et analyse de l’oeuvre, 1978, pages 355 and 503
Karen Wilkin, The Automatists: Then and Now, Galerie Dresdnere, 1986, reproduced page 54
David Burnett, Les Automatistes: Montreal Painting of the 1940s and 1950s, Drabinsky Gallery, 1990, page 32

EXHIBITED
Galerie Agnès Lefort, Montreal, Borduas: 28 Watercolours, May 22 – June 9, 1956
Brooklyn Museum, New York, International Watercolor Exhibition, 20th Biennial, April 7 – May 31, 1959, titled as The Girl from Arles in the Ballad, catalogue #9
Galerie Agnès Lefort, Montreal, Borduas – Riopelle: Encres et aquarelles, September 18 – October 1, 1965
Galerie Claude Lafitte, Montreal, Grands maîtres européens et canadiens et artistes de la galerie, June 12 – September 15, 1985, catalogue #26
Galerie Dresdnere, Toronto, The Automatists: Then and Now, May 1 – 21, 1986, catalogue #3
Drabinsky Gallery, Toronto, Les Automatistes: Montreal Painting of the 1940s and 1950s, October 13 – November 7, 1990

Paul-Émile Borduas was particularly interested in producing watercolours in 1954. It is not always possible to associate a title to an extant watercolour, as we can in the case of L’Arlésienne en balade, for the history of each work can be difficult to retrace. But one thing is sure—that we can attribute this inspired production of 1954 to the impact of American painting on Borduas. Since he had moved to New York in 1953, Borduas knew well what was happening there, so it was no longer possible to say, as he did at the beginning of his residency in New York, that Paris remained the capital of the arts. The artist needed to assimilate new techniques like dripping or splashing, new concepts of pictorial space such as bi-dimensionality and all-overness, and new formats. Watercolour permitted him to work rapidly and was the perfect medium for this kind of exploration.

In L’Arlésienne en balade, Borduas adapted plant-like forms to a horizontal format in a relatively all-over composition. The fact that he hesitated to go beyond the rectangle of the paper on which he was working is an indication that the idea of a centred composition had a hold on him. In Jackson Pollock’s paintings, for example, one often has the impression that the network of lines seen on the canvas could expand out of the frame in all directions—there is no opposition between centre and periphery. Such works were compared by malicious critics to wallpaper for that reason.

Here, the graceful movement, sensed by following the black strokes and the green spots in this Borduas watercolour, may have suggested the title. L'Arlésienne (usually translated into English as The Girl from Arles) is the title of a play written by Alphonse Daudet, for which Georges Bizet had composed the incidental music in 1872. It suggests once more Borduas’s interest in music. Other Borduas titles go in the same direction: Allegro furioso, Tombeau pour une cathédrale défunte, Chant d’été, Symphonie, to name just a few. This is not surprising for an abstract painter, since abstraction was often compared to music by its early promoters. The idea was that painting, like music, could stimulate feelings, without being figurative. In his 1912 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky wrote: “Generally speaking, colour is a power which directly influences the soul (i.e., the feelings). Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”

The story of L’Arlésienne en balade is a little complicated. It was exhibited at the International Watercolor Exhibition, 20th Biennial, at the Brooklyn Museum in spring 1959. After Borduas's death, Galerie Agnès Lefort in Montreal exhibited it with the works of Jean Paul Riopelle in September 1965. But it is when it was sold, by Heffel in November 1995, that it was acquired by a Vancouver collector. Before that it was shown at Galerie Claude Lafitte in Montreal and at Dresdnere Gallery in Toronto. In other words, the watercolour itself was “en balade“ (on a stroll) for a long time!

The above essay was written by the late François-Marc Gagnon of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, in 2015.

This work is included in François-Marc Gagnon's online catalogue raisonné on the artist’s work at https://www.borduas.concordia.ca/en/catalog/3002, catalogue #2005-1037.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars