Provenance
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Gallery Moos, Toronto (1963)
By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario
Literature
Yseult Riopelle, “Jean Paul Riopelle: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 3”, 1960- 1965, Montreal, 2009, reproduced page 128, cat. no. 1961.024H.1961
Guy Cogeval and Stéphane Aquin (eds.), “Riopelle”, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2006, page 85
A prominent member of the Automatistes and a signatory of the Refus Global, Jean Paul Riopelle was a lifelong avant-garde and experimental artist. Riopelle’s works are both expressive and formal, responding to the art historical and socio-political environment of the post-war era, unique from his abstract-expressionist peers. Jeffery Spalding writes on the artist’s work: “Each and every painting was an individual creation, not merely a member of a set or series. Yet, simultaneously each painting remained unquestionably identifiable as signature-brand Riopelle.”
Among the avant-garde Quebec abstract artists, Jean Paul Riopelle was the most celebrated figure on the international scene. He first travelled to France in 1946 and returned to Montreal for only a few months before settling in Paris until the 1970s. Riopelle soon met the Parisian art dealer Pierre Loeb, owner of Galerie Pierre, who promoted major Surrealist and Cubist artists, including Picasso and Miró. It was through Loeb that Riopelle met André Breton, who invited Riopelle to participate in the major Surrealist exhibition of June 1947 held at the Galerie Maeght.
The following decade brought further success for Riopelle due to increased contact with prominent members of the New York School and international art scene. In 1951 his work was shown in the international exhibition, “Véhémences confrontées (Confronted Vehemence)”, alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others. He was then discovered by the art dealer Pierre Matisse (grandson of Henri Matisse), who held regular solo exhibitions of Riopelle’s art in New York in the mid-to-late 1950s. His famous large-scale ‘mosaic’ paintings of the time caught the attention of many, reinforcing the manufactured rivalry between the Paris and New York post-war movements.
“Polyvalencia”, completed in 1961, illustrates a new direction which Riopelle began to take in his paintings of the late 1950s. Though maintaining aspects of his mosaic-like paint application known as tachisme, Riopelle abandoned an all-over structure and atomized brushstrokes in favour of lines. In “Polyvalencia”, the lines almost resemble shapes and letters; these loose depictions of indistinct forms would gradually evolve into figuration, which appear in his works towards the end of the decade, most commonly in the form of birds and animals. Created during a vital and transitional period, “Polyvalencia” highlights the artist’s consistent and rapid evolution in oil painting, which has been described as “startling in both its lightning- like progression and its consistency: no degree of success seemed to detain the young painter or restrain his absolute desire to explore the medium’s possibilities even further.”
This oil painting also dates to a significant period in Riopelle’s personal life. By 1959, Riopelle had finalized his divorce from his wife Françoise Lespérence and began a romantic relationship with American abstract painter Joan Mitchell. In the same year, Mitchell settled permanently in Paris to live with Riopelle. They travelled together and influenced each other’s artwork throughout the following decade. There is no doubt that Mitchell’s intellectual and artistic presence inspired Riopelle’s rapidly evolving style of the late 1950s and early 1960s, as seen in works such as “Polyvalencia”, which led him from abstraction back to figuration.
