Le baiser, 1994

Waddington and Gorce Inc., Montreal Art Sales and Rental Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Private Collection, Montreal

Ian McGillis, ‘Discovered Again: MMFA Honours Jean McEwen 20 Years After His Death’, “Montreal Gazette”, September 27, 2019 Roald Nasgaard, “Abstract Painting in Canada”, Vancouver/Toronto, 2007, pages 174-78 Roald Nasgaard and Ray Ellenwood, “The Automatiste Revolution”, Markham, 2009, pages 82-85 Fernande Saint-Martin, “McEwen, 1953-73”, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, 1973, unpaginated

A self-taught artist, Jean McEwen’s initial and primary career for many years was in pharmaceuticals. In 1961, after receiving a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, he reduced his hours spent at the pharmacy to focus on painting. He divided his time between the two careers until the mid 1970s. As with many autodidacts he was resistant to labels being applied to his work, once saying, “There are two ways to judge a painting. One is based on criteria and theories of art. The second is based on the sensations we get before a picture. I paint the second way.” After achieving significant success in the art world, McEwen spent much of his mature career teaching Visual Arts. He was a professor at Concordia University from 1982 to 1994. The large oil on canvas “Le baiser” was completed during his last year in this position. This composition emphasizes the visual effects of space and edges. The two central vertical bands touch each other ever so gently in the middle, with glimpses of the white ground visible behind them - perhaps alluding to the painting’s title, translating to ‘The Kiss’. These slightly irregular shapes meet in an imperfect way, putting the focus of the work on this central line. The ochre areas on the right and left edges of the composition seem to suggest that they would continue further if they were not cut off by the borders of the canvas. Fernande Saint-Martin’s argument that McEwen “repeatedly stresses that what is important to him is the establishment of chromatic juxtapositions so extreme and rich, that they impose themselves on the spectator. Colour is to McEwen a mutable and expressive element to which he can never refer in terms of single pigments: he tends to talk of ‘the yellows’ or ‘the purples’ in the plural, suggesting thereby the emotional impact and symphonic potential of colour in concert.” The colour palette of “Le baiser” fits the author’s description, as the central shapes can only be loosely categorized as red, for they are a complex mixture of brown, red, orange and yellow pigments. Also on the subject of Jean McEwen’s use of colour, Roald Nasgaard compares the enchanting luminosity of the artist’s work, including the glowing red of “Le baiser”, to that of the French Impressionists. The author states: “His continuous coloured textures are built out of strata of superimposed paint layers, sometimes as many as a dozen. Their ever more variegated hues and tones lie in ambiguous depths, sometimes opaque and other times transparent and luminous. Light emanates from within them or it reflects from their surfaces, and often they seem dappled like sunlight in a Renoir nude.”