Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Vancouver/Toronto, 2007, page 180
The 1960s was a decade of well-deserved recognition for Letendre’s work, beginning with a solo exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1961. In 1962, Letendre traveled to Europe, visiting Paris, Rome and then Israel. As the Automatiste group and its affiliates began to abandon their commitment to spontaneity in favour of more a controlled and deliberate structure, Letendre chose to maintain the impulsive and expressive brushstrokes in her work. “Serie B, No. 2 (FH-22P)” highlights this tendency in her work of the early 1960s, evident in the spontaneous and gestural black strokes applied to the paper. Letendre kept a fairly consistent palette of dramatic colours, often with large masses of black, until the mid-1960s when she took a decisive shift into geometric compositions.
