Michèle Grandbois, “Jean-Paul Lemieux: Life & Work” [online publication], Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2016, pages 55, 61 and 63
This enchanting oil painting was created during an artistic breakthrough in Jean Paul Lemieux’s career, when he began to reach a new and broader audience. Between 1958 and 1965 the artist was the subject of solo shows in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City. He also took part in four biennial exhibitions organized by the National Gallery in Ottawa. His international reputation was growing, as his works were shown at the Bienal of São Paulo, the Canadian pavilion at the Brussels International Exposition, as well as in many exhibitions of Canadian painting throughout the United States and Europe.
As Quebec was experiencing a decade of artistic innovation with flourishing avant-garde abstract movements, Lemieux himself turned away from narrative to focus on the flat space of the picture plane. He never fully embraced abstraction, however; the artist rather painted large, empty landscapes with a bare horizon line or a figure in the foreground. Lemieux “expressed the perilous human condition by showing figures isolated in their personal solitude.” These features came to be the defining traits of Lemieux’s “classic period”, categorized as dating between 1956 and 1970.
“Jeune fille en forêt”, completed in 1963, is exemplary of Lemieux’s work of this period; the solitary figure standing in front of a forest invites the contemplation of the human condition and of the smallness of human beings before the various landscapes in Canada. The viewer is reminded of mankind’s role in the landscape, its presence altering the natural order and its place within the universe as a dependent of the landscape it occupies—the landscape and figure are not mutually exclusive. The artist states: “The landscape is the setting. If you could have a world without human beings, the landscape would be the same. But the presence of man changes everything. It is the place of the human within the universe that matters. The person finds his footing, finds himself, in the landscape.”
The colour scheme is also in keeping with the period: Michèle Grandbois remarks that “his palette was now limited to just a few pigments: olive green, white, shades of ochre, earth colours, and red.” Lemieux’s landscape is nearly abstract; the viewer can only make out a few tree trunks amid what is assumed to be a leafy forest. It is the title and the presence of the figure that creates a context for the work. The presence of the ‘jeune fille’, standing unclothed in the lower right corner, recalls the “synthetist” art of the Nabis. Lemieux travelled to France in 1954 after receiving a grant from the Royal Society of Canada. There, he was taken by the work of the Nabis members including Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, along with their early references to symbolism and subjects of women in forests and gardens. This sojourn, combined with the active Quebec art scene and many other personal interests, resulted in a major change in Lemieux’s pictorial language, as evidenced in “Jeune fille en forét”.
