Jean Paul Riopelle’s reputation as an avant-garde painter was established in Canada, Europe, and increasingly in New York City through the 1950s. Working in Paris since the late 1940s, he represented Canada in the Bienal de São Paulo in 1951 and 1955 and at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1962. He showed in the Younger European Painters exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1953; the Guggenheim soon purchased one of his works. He exhibited with the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York from 1954, embodying that gallery’s goal to introduce post World War II European art into an ascendant American context focused on Abstract Expressionism.
The 1960s was for Riopelle a time of consolidation, both of his unique technique and his growing fame. He also returned to Québec frequently in the 1960s and eventually resettled in that province. “Dieppes” exemplifies his work at this time. As bold and experimental as ever, Riopelle displays a confidence of approach and a mastery of paint application. “Dieppes” is prodigiously dynamic: shapes emerge, overlap, and mingle as they construct a multi-layered topography of pigment. Colour is suppressed across the full surface so that the flashes of red and orange stand out. This intermittent, crepuscular colour underlines the fact that this is a painting whose drama lies in its extreme tonal range, from deep black lozenge shapes to intense whites. More fluid than many of his ‘mosaic’ works of the 1950s, the surface seems to require the internal frame of black that forms an internal border. Riopelle has signed his name to this feature in the lower right.
Exuberant as the surface of “Dieppes” is, Riopelle denied that he worked with a sort of Surrealist abandon. He had been associated with André Breton, the ‘pope’ of Surrealism, but was happily excommunicated from this allegiance well before the 1960s. In 1966, however, a French critic was still looking back to this time when he wrote that “Riopelle works in a state of crisis, a sort of hypnotic fury and abandon.” When this judgement was put to the artist in an interview decades later, he disagreed. “That wasn’t my way,” he claimed. “Georges Mathieu worked hard and fast. Not Riopelle.” Riopelle was not one to perform abstraction, as Mathieu notoriously did for live audiences, nor was he an ‘action painter’ in the American mold. While not planned and certainly passionate in its application, “Dieppes” is in all senses ‘composed.’ It is carefully balanced in terms of gesture, tone, and colour. And there is the stabilizing frame within a frame.
The uncontrived painterliness of “Dieppes” invites our minute attention. Forms shift, layers accrete. We can readily become optical archaeologists, delving into the complex welter of multi-coloured and variously light and dark forms. It is pleasurably impossible to measure scale or find one’s bearings when ‘inside’ a painting of this sort.
We extend our thanks to Dr. Mark A. Cheetham, professor of art history at the University of Toronto and author of “Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the ‘60s” (Cambridge University Press), for contributing the preceding essay.
