PROVENANCE
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Toronto
A.K. Prakash & Associates Inc., Toronto
The Collection of Torben V. Kristiansen, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 2, 1954 – 1959, 2004, reproduced page 207, catalogue #1955.052H.1955
Jean Paul Riopelle Exhibition and Sale, Masters Gallery Ltd. in conjunction with The Art Emporium, 2016, reproduced front cover (detail) and page 17

EXHIBITED
Masters Gallery Ltd., Vancouver, Jean Paul Riopelle Exhibition and Sale, April 23 – May 7, 2016

Executed in 1955, Sans titre is a prime example of Jean Paul Riopelle’s coveted mosaic period, so-called because the successive strokes of his palette knife, pressed down from above into layers of paint applied directly to the canvas, produced raised imprints resembling the tesserae of Byzantine mosaics. Riopelle’s canvases of this period are remarkable for their extraordinary energy and chromatic intensity, which he achieved by working rapidly, from pure instinct, relinquishing conscious control over the act of painting.

The results of his gestures were obscured from his field of vision, so his forms were always unstable and open, never planned or visible in advance. Each new application of paint evoked a new surprise and fresh inspiration. As Riopelle himself explained:

The painting must work itself out. It is a process.… I am not one of those artists seeking a wonderful green.… I never tell myself, that I have to paint like this or like that to get one effect or another. If I reach that point, I stop. It’s dangerous … because then I am on the technical side of painting. There is always some solution to improve a painting that isn’t working. But this does not interest me. It loses its emotional unity.[1]

The present work is characterized by a swirling movement that bifurcates the canvas along the diagonal. Despite the abstracted arrangement of colour, form begins to cohere around the sombre earth tones punctuated by ribbons of bright scarlet and vivid green sweeping from left to right, and the enigmatic suggestion of a bird’s head in deep blue at upper left. We could be witnessing the bird about to take flight, sensing the movement of the air as it unfurls and beats its powerful wings, or perhaps the need to give pictorial form to clusters of sensations is a trick of the imagination. Certainly, even Riopelle’s most abstract works always bear ephemeral allusions to nature. As the French art historian Bernard Dorival suggests: “When we look at certain works by this artist, it is hard to resist saying that there is an unmistakable impression of forest, while others conjure up long-buried memories of fields and meadows.[2]

While Riopelle developed a unique and instantly recognizable style that was his own, his work contains the traces of his artistic forebears, for instance the pulsating whirls of van Gogh, the “constructive stroke” of Cézanne, which represented visual effects, and perhaps most importantly, the showers of pure colour that become increasingly abstract in late Monet. In the words of Jean-Louis Prat, “They are fragments of nature, these paintings of Riopelle, just as the Water Lilies painted by Claude Monet towards the end of his life are fragments of landscape, of water and of endless flowers, with neither landmark nor real boundary.”[3]

Today, Riopelle’s oeuvre is regarded by some art historians as among the most important of the second half of the twentieth century, far surpassing that of his contemporaries in Paris in the 1950s.[4] Over the course of his career, he garnered multiple prestigious accolades including the UNESCO prize at the Venice Biennale in 1962, followed by the Order of Canada in 1969. His work is held in important collections internationally, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Tate in London, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

1. Quoted in Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, 1939 – 1953 (Montreal: Hibou Éditeurs, 1999), 51.

2. Quoted in Jean Paul Riopelle and Denise L. Bissonnette, Jean Paul Riopelle (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1991), exhibition catalogue, 81.

3. Ibid., 12.

4. Riopelle, special issue of Connaissance des Arts, no. 179 (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts & Connaissance des Arts, 2002), exhibition catalogue, 5.

For the biography on Torben V. Kristiansen in PDF format, please click here.

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