Sold for: $12,500

PROVENANCE
Loan from the Artist to Jean-Paul Riopelle, 1948 - 1971
Galerie Gilles Corbeil, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal
Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 26, 2010, lot 026
Private Collection, Toronto
Hodgins Art Auctions, May 28, 2018, lot 053
Private Collection, Montreal
Post-War & Contemporary Art, BYDealers, May 29, 2022, lot 025
Private Collection, Montreal

LITERATURE
Gilles Hénault, "Au sujet d'une exposition de P. Gauvreau", Combat, November 22, 1947
Tancrède Marsil, "Gauvreau automatiste", Quartier Latin, November 28, 1947
François-Marc Gagnon, Chronique du mouvement automatiste québécois, 1998, pages 392, 732 and 733
Jeanette Biondi, Le jeune homme en colère: Biographie de Pierre Gauvreau, 2003, pages 165 and 166

EXHIBITED
75 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Trente-trois tableaux de Pierre Gauvreau, November 15 - 30, 1947, catalogue #24
Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris, Rixes, January - July 1951, traveling to Galerie Marcel Evrard, Lille; Galerie Lou Cosyn, Brussels; and Galerie Springer, Berlin

Demobilized from the Canadian army in the summer of 1946, Pierre Gauvreau returned from England and settled very quickly into the Montreal art scene, taking part in a group exhibition with the Contemporary Arts Society in November 1946 and in another in February 1947 with the painters who in those very weeks were dubbed “Les Automatistes” by journalists. This second Automatist group show was held in the Gauvreau family apartment on Sherbrooke Street West. Pierre must have started painting immediately on his return, because by November of 1947 he had enough for a solo exhibition of 33 works in that same apartment. Naze iman brun was included, as we know from the list published in François-Marc Gagnon’s Chronique du mouvement automatiste québécois. The title probably comes from the poet Claude Gauvreau, Pierre's brother, whose fantastic explorational language is in evidence here and with other titles in the show, such as Tnerrêche. Domestic as it may have been, this solo exhibition actually gave rise to six substantial articles in three Montreal newspapers, including “Gauvreau, automatiste”, an interview of the painter by the young journalist Tancrède Marsil, and a review by Gilles Hénault, poet and critic destined to be an early director of Montreal's Museum of Contemporary Art, who wrote, “If we look at Gauvreau’s paintings as they should be looked at, concentrating on their plastic qualities, we have to conclude that they are among the best we’ve seen, at least among young French-Canadian painters.”

Naze iman brun was in Jean-Paul Riopelle's collection for more than 20 years because it, along with other Gauvreau paintings, accompanied Riopelle and his wife Françoise back to France in December of 1948. They had come home to Canada to have their first child, Yseult, and while they were there, signed the Automatist manifesto, Refus global. The idea was to show the paintings in Europe, including Naze iman brun, as eventually happened. Though Riopelle’s friendship with André Breton eventually cooled, he maintained contact with members of a Surrealist splinter group around the magazine Rixes. In 1951, Rixes organized a series of exhibitions in which Gauvreau appeared with Riopelle and other painters from around the world including Christine Boumeester (France), Henri Goetz (France), Iaroslav Serpan (France), Jerzy Kujawski (Poland), Matta Echaurren (Chile), Francisco Nieva (Spain), Heinz Trökes (Germany) and Enrique Zanartu (Chile). Over the spring and summer, this exhibition appeared at the Galerie Marcel Evrard in Lille, at the Galerie Springer in Berlin, and at the Galerie Lou Cosyn in Brussels, as mentioned by Gagnon in Chronique du mouvement automatiste québécois and Jeanette Biondi in Le jeune homme en colère: Biographie de Pierre Gauvreau.

The painting came back to Canada with Riopelle in 1971, to Galerie Gilles Corbeil in Montreal, and later found its way into a private collection, where it was not seen publicly for a very long time. Naze iman brun is very rich in its brown shades, very imposing in spite of its small size, and is characteristic of Gauvreau’s work at this time. It is certainly non-realist but still figurative in its organization, with biomorphic shapes against a varied background, with patches of colour and sketched lines laid on with a brush, rather than the palette knife that was becoming popular with other members of the group.

We thank Ray Ellenwood co-author of Automatiste Revolution, for contributing the above original essay.

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