Sans titre (circa 1959), 1959

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York The Estate of Florence McCormick, New Jersey Private Collection Sotheby’s London, auction, October 23, 2001, Lot 480 Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto Private Collection, Toronto

Yseult Riopelle, “Jean Paul Riopelle: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 2, 1954-1958”, Montreal, 2004, reproduced page 329, catalogue no. 1959.053H.V1959

Few Canadian artists have received such sustained and high praise as Jean Paul Riopelle did during his prolific career and since his death in 2002. He garnered abundant national and international awards, participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe, the USA, and Canada, and saw his work collected in prominent private and public settings. A pupil of Paul-Émile Borduas in Montreal in the 1940s, he was a signatory to the manifesto “Refus Global” (1948), Canada’s most famous and influential proclamation of artistic and cultural liberty. He was a prominent member of the avant-garde group Les Automatistes before moving to France in 1947. There he became part of the Surrealist circle. André Breton – the leader of the Surrealists – included him in the landmark “6th International Exhibition of Surrealism” at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947. Riopelle was the only Canadian. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1962 and returned to Québec in 1972. A celebrated artist when he left Canada for Paris in the late 1940s, it was in that city that Riopelle consolidated both his signature style of painting and came to international prominence. By the early 1950s, he had perfected his autograph ‘mosaic’ style, the highly active treatment of the painting surface from which emerges an order that feels both optically prismatic and cosmic. “Sans titre” inherits the extensive variety of forms and colours and the sharp-edged, dramatic handling of pigment from Riopelle’s work of the early 1950s. At that time, the areas of blue, green, red, yellow, and passages of white, black, and dark green, typically did not compete for dominance but instead commanded every piece of the support. By the time Riopelle painted “Sans titre” at the end of this decade, however, this skein of painterly markings has loosened. The surface is as vibrant as ever, but forms seem to move more freely through it. There is a concentration of energy just off the physical centre of this painting. Riopelle was rarely literal enough to be describing an object, however, or to suggest that we see something in particular. His freedom of execution rightly transposes to the viewer. Yet there is something like a focus here, however temporary, more a concentration of energy than an image. “Sans titre” is thus the right title: Riopelle does not want to lead us in too specific a manner. The use of abundant white is striking here and characteristic of Riopelle’s work at this time. Large areas of this pigment appear in and adjacent to the corners; smaller splinters are collected near the centre. With a sense of movement and play, the white areas are shot through with the other colours of the canvas, or more accurately, colours are dragged through one another. The result is movement and visual complexity. Paint as material and manipulated surface is asserted, but we can also see the painting as geological in its evocation of layers and seismic movement. Riopelle’s paintings of the 1950s were often likened to both European Surrealist-inspired abstraction of the School of Paris and to American Abstract Expressionism, especially that of Jackson Pollock, however disparate their approaches were. Despite his Surrealist pedigree, Riopelle often denied that he worked with abandon. While “Sans titre” is freely exuberant in handling, on the micro level of form and colour, it is also carefully adjusted to yield an overall sense of calibrated movement. Shapes tumble towards or into the centre, framed by a less dense and largely white perimeter. Another reason why Riopelle’s work at this time was compared with American abstraction especially was his close relationship with his New York City art dealer, Pierre Matisse (son of the famous artist). Matisse took Riopelle on in 1953 and included him in a group gallery exhibition that fall. He had his first solo show in the USA there in 1954: “Riopelle: First American Exhibition”. “Sans titre” was originally purchased from the Pierre Matisse Gallery, cementing its history in that of the sometimes fraught, always lively struggle between New York and Paris for artworld ascendence at this time. We extend our thanks to Mark A. Cheetham for contributing the preceding essay. Mark A. Cheetham is the author of two books on abstract art: “The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting” and “Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the ‘60s”. He is a professor of Art History at the University of Toronto.