Portrait de femme

Kastel Gallery, Montreal Private Collection

Guy Robert, “Lemieux”, Toronto, 1978, pages 209 and 244 Michèle Grandbois, “Jean Paul Lemieux: Life & Work” [online publication], Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2016, page 63

Portraits occupy a strong presence in Jean Paul Lemieux’s multi-faceted body of work. Throughout his career he depicted his sitters in a frontal stance with a direct view into the facial expression. Guy Robert, on the subject of the artist’s portraits, writes that “Lemieux believes that the face has a message to impart all through life, and a good deal of his work has been concerned with capturing the characteristic expressions of different stages of life from cradle to the deathbed.” Inspiration for documenting the human expression came from an interest in American Social Realism in his early career, particularly the movement’s interest in showcasing the daily lives of working class people. Later in life, Lemieux’s portraits were influenced by Edvard Munch and the Expressionist school of painting, as they seek to portray anxiety and the artist’s “dark, tragic vision of the tormented historical era he was living through.” 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 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.” In “Portrait de femme”, Lemieux depicts one of his isolated figures, staring straight out at the viewer, surrounded by a very dark blue background. Faint rectangular forms and dots in the background, as well as the figure’s warm clothing, suggest that the painting is set outdoors, possibly in a city at night. Lemieux often depicted a solitary figure in a landscape, reminding the viewer of mankind’s 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.”