Rencontre enflammée by Rita Letendre




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Rita Letendre
Rencontre enflammée
oil on canvas
signed and dated 1962 lower right; titled on three labels on the reverse
84 x 42 ins ( 213.4 x 106.7 cms )
Estimated: $250,000.00 - $350,000.00
Edgar and Dorothy Davidson, Montreal/Ottawa, 1972
Heffel Fine Art, auction, Vancouver, May 17, 2011, lot 62
Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg
Private Collection, British Columbia
“ICYMI: Remembering Rita Letendre” [online publication], The Art Gallery of Ontario, 24 November 2021
“Rencontre enflammée”, dating to 1962, was completed during this pivotal period of growth in Letendre’s career. As she became better equipped with painting materials and more time to work, she began creating larger canvases with explosions of colour. Letendre had recently won second prize in the painting category in the 1961 Concours artistiques du Québec. Her compositions grew to be very personal and carefully planned, and she began anchoring masses with carefully visualized gestures, amid fields of thick impasto. Dramatic and evocative, Rencontre enflammée is composed of three vertically stacked black organic forms with small, loose strokes of blue and white painted over them. Behind these black masses is a striking ground of yellow and red thrashes that are reminiscent of flames, recalling Letendre’s title which translates to “fiery encounter”. On her use of colour and light, the artist claimed: “Light and colour, and sometimes the absence of colour, have always been the key elements in my painting. With its different values, colour reflects the shades of life. But light, from the first shock of birth to the last breath of life‒light is life.” In this canvas, Letendre plays with this relationship between light, colour and the absence of colour: the three black forms create haunting voids that are encompassed by the mesmerizing light of flames.
Although the title Letendre chose for “Rencontre enflammée” makes reference to a representational subject, her paintings of this time were very much still based in Automatism rather than on a particular subject. She stated, “My thoughts, my attitudes are automatist, which means that I have no set formula. My paintings are completely emotional, full of hair-trigger intensity. Through them, I challenge space and time. I paint freedom, escape from the here and now, from the mundane...The world isn’t only what we see or what we experience.”
The 1960s was a decade of well-deserved recognition for Letendre’s work, beginning with a solo exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1961. In 1962, when “Rencontre enflammée” was completed, Letendre received a Canada Council Grant, and travelled with Ulysse Comtois to Europe, visiting Paris, Rome and then Israel.
As the Automatiste group and its affiliates began to abandon their commitment to spontaneity in favour of a more controlled and deliberate structure, Letendre chose to maintain the impulsive and expressive brushstrokes in her work. Letendre kept a fairly consistent palette of dramatic colours, often with large masses of black, until the mid-1960s when she took a decisive shift into geometric compositions once again.
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Rita Letendre
(1928 - 2021) RCA
Canadian painter, muralist, and printmaker Rita Letendre was born in Drummondville, Quebec, in 1928. She is of Iroquois descent. Letendre and her parents moved to Montreal in 1941. She settled in Toronto in 1963. In part, Letendre is self-taught but she studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montreal for year and a half. While in school she was introduced to the Automatistes due to pamphlets announcing the locations of their new paintings.
Encouraged by Borduas, Mosseau, and Ferron’s art, Letendre began exploring similar motifs in her paintings and began exhibiting with the group from 1952-55. In 1955 she exhibited in “Espace 1955” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Sharing a studio with fellow Automatiste painter and sculptor, Ulysse Comtois, Letendre became the subject of an article by the Weekend Magazine on non-objective Montreal-based painters. Then, in 1959, Letendre was included in the Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art. In the following year the National Gallery of Canada included Letendre in their Non-Figurative Artists of Montreal exhibit that traveled throughout Canada. In 1962, Letendre received a travelling grant from the Canada Council and traveled to Paris, Italy, Israel, Spain, Belgium, and Germany.
Using a variety of techniques and media such as brush, spatula, pastel, silkscreen, and airbrush, Letendre was a leading member of the colourist movement. Exhibited in over sixty-five solo exhibitions, Letendre’s work can be described in three distinct periods. Her first period, known as the Montreal years, was inspired by her first meeting with Borduas and was a rich exploration of self-discovery. Letendre’s second period was inspired by Russian-born sculptor Kosso Eloul, who later became her husband. Her final period was rooted in mourning and love.
Letendre’s works vary in size from grand murals that are sixty feet by sixty feet in size to small projects on silkscreen. These works are collected throughout the North American continent by governments and public and private galleries and organizations. Letendre’s work has been exhibited in Europe, Israel, Japan, and throughout North America in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.
Literature Sources:
"A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume II”, compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1979
Roumanes, Jacques-Bernard. “Rita Letendre: Le tableau ivre.” Vie des Arts 45, 183, 2001
Andersen, Marguerite. “Rita Letendre: Énergie et luminosité. L’art du féminin, 12 2004
We extend our thanks to Danie Klein, York University graduate student in art history, for writing and contributing this artist biography.