The Market Stall

Dominion Gallery, Montreal Roberts Gallery, Toronto Masters Gallery, Calgary Private Collection, Toronto

Frances K. Smith, André Biéler: An Artist’s Life and Times, Richmond Hill, Ontario, reproduced page 199

A modernist painter of the small-town Quebec landscape, Swiss-born André Biéler studied at the Institut Technique de Montréal before enlisting in the Canadian Army in World War I. He subsequently studied at the New York Art Students League in Woodstock, New York, as well as in Switzerland and Paris. Biéler held his first solo exhibition at the Montreal Art Association in 1924, and returned permanently to Canada two years later, settling in Ste-Famille on Île d’Orléans in the Gaspé area of Quebec. Seeking a more active and social art community, in 1930 Bieler moved to 1100 Beaver Hall Hill in Montreal, the centre of the Beaver Hall Group. Thereafter, the artist’s work grew increasingly modernist and experimentational in stylistic approach. Biéler’s early work of the thirties and fourties was greatly influenced by his uncle, Swiss painter and muralist Ernest Biéler. His paintings reflect the drawing skills and attention to form reminiscent of stained glass, mosaic and fresco work. From the time Biéler moved to Île d’Orléans in 1926 until 1947, his style could be described as ‘modernist regionalist’, successfully fusing his love of shape and form with that of human subjects. In his exuberant genre scenes of rural Quebec life, human figures appear in harmony with the landscape as they work in groups and gather around churches, markets and farms. “The Market Stall” depicts an animated scene of a farmer’s market on a summer day, bustling with activity and rendered in soft, colourful forms.