Sold for: $289,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie Maeght, Paris
Galerie Martal, Montreal
Important Canadian Art, Sotheby's Canada in association with Ritchie's, May 27, 2003, lot 187
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 4, 1966 - 1971, 2014, page 39, reproduced page 116, catalogue #1966.053H.1966

It was claimed that Jean Paul Riopelle did not like to paint if anyone was watching him. Nevertheless, there is an intriguing eyewitness account from book dealer Robert Keane, who recounted:

I will never forget this scene. First, he did not paint with a brush but rather with what looked like a putty knife. Second, judging by the hundreds of empty tubes that lay at his feet, he was using a phenomenal quantity of paint. He did not unscrew his tubes. He decapitated them in one move with his knife…Red, blue, or green: the colours appeared suddenly at the tip of his fingers…he held all the tubes…as many as his hand could hold in his fist and then either poured them directly on the canvas or managed to have one colour mixing with the next by pressing the tubes in a certain way.

Riopelle’s use of colour in Sans titre is luxurious, and his paint work is tactile - built in ridges, swoops and squiggles. He loosely retained his mosaic approach of gathering layers of paint on his knife and revealing them in the swipes of his knife-strokes. Riopelle’s method of painting gave free rein to chance or accident, as the Surrealists put it, and his brushwork is the essence of freedom and unpredictability.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars