In 1965, the special exhibition on Jean Paul Lemieux at Agnès Lefort was a memorable event in the history of the contemporary art market in Montreal. On Sunday, January 10, at 3 p.m., within a few minutes after the gallery doors opened at 1508 Sherbrooke West Street, “almost in a rush” wrote the critic Laurent Lamy of “Le Devoir”, all of the 15 works of the Quebec artist were sold. Among them: “Jeune fille au chandail jaune”. The proportion of figural paintings is greater than that of landscapes in this exhibition, where notably the young girl with rosy cheeks, wrapped up warmly, from “Manteau de lapin” (private collection), “Nathalie” (private collection), the teenager from “L’énigme” (private collection), the city dweller with shadows under the eyes from “Le soleil se lève... le soleil s’en va” (private collection), are displayed side by side and are all dated from 1964. The journalists covering the event do not agree on the time it took — four minutes according to Rea Montbizon of “The Gazette”, thirty minutes according to Lamy — to achieve this masterstroke. Two years earlier, in April 1963, it had been the same for the first exhibition of Lemieux in this gallery, which had also experienced spectacular success.
In 1964, Jean Paul Lemieux was in his sixties. After thirty years of teaching at the École des beaux–arts de Québec, he devoted all his time to his pictorial creation. However, the supply is insufficient to meet the unprecedented demand from Montreal collectors. To explain this situation, the painter claims that he “paints slowly” and “with difficulty” before adding: “I am never happy with my first brushstrokes. I can paint for a while and then I get tired of it and stop. I can start with a landscape, end up with a human form, then return to the landscape.” As for the popular belief that Jean Paul Lemieux would have produced only around twenty paintings per year, it deserves to
be reviewed in the light of the compilation of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, which to date includes some 155 paintings executed from 1960 to 1964, including 43 in the last year.
Galerie Agnès Lefort in Montreal was an avant–garde art gallery in Canada. The painter and art dealer Agnès Lefort (1891–1973) established it in 1950 before selling it to Mira Godard (1928–2010) in 1962, who would become the country’s dynamic and great lady of contemporary art. The latter retained the company name of its predecessor for a few months before changing it to Galerie Godard Lefort. At the beginning of the 1970s, Madame Godard established herself in the “Ville Reine”, where the company still operates. The business relationship undertaken in the early 1960s between Mira Godard and Jean Paul Lemieux was the key to success for the painter for decades to come. His rapid rise in the Canadian art market is partly due to her.
It must be said that the career of the painter Jean Paul Lemieux has left no one indifferent since the end of the 1950s: major Canadian museums have acquired his works, several of which have been shown abroad thanks to exhibitions in Sao Paulo, Brussels, Pittsburgh, Venice, Warsaw, New York, London and Paris. Lemieux, who had rarely presented special exhibitions before the age of 52, presented solo shows in Quebec, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. In 1964, when he painted “Jeune fille au chandail jaune”, he created a mural for the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. In 1966, he was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. The following year, his country’s government celebrated his contribution by funding a major retrospective exhibition that brought together 108 paintings and drawings at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as part of the Centennial of Canada’s Confederation, the year of Expo 67 in Montreal. The exhibition travelled to the Musée du Québec (now the Musée national des beaux–arts du Québec) and the National Gallery of Canada. During the 1960s, the consecration of Jean Paul Lemieux was confirmed, and honours accumulated.
The rise of the painter Lemieux in the Canadian art world corresponds to the renewal of his painting, more refined, even minimal, which values a simplified space in landscapes and the immutability of solitary characters, aware of the emptiness surrounding them. “Jeune fille au chandail jaune” belongs to Lemieux’s manner of painting between 1956 and 1970, which art historians will define as a “classical period”. While the abstract wave swept over Canadian art, Lemieux renewed his figurative language by composing his paintings “according to a rather rigid geometry that is the logical extension of his usual bareness and stiffness that he has always given to his characters. The precise proportions of the masses and colours add a new dimension to his painting.”
This is exactly what happens in “Jeune fille au chandail jaune,” where the balance of dark and light masses is remarkably successful in the oblong space the artist reserves for most of his characters, which is nevertheless more pronounced in this painting. On a formal level, the triangular neckline of the sweater elongates the cylindrical neck on which the head rests, framed by the irregular fringe of dark hair cut squarely below the ear. The smiling girl with a rounded face casts an inviting gaze on the viewer: two small black beads placed away from the upturned nose are enough to hold our attention. Then begins “the conversation” of a plastic, sensory and emotional order to which the art of Jean Paul Lemieux invites, a humanist painter, if ever there was one, but very attentive to form, alongside the non–figurative painters of his generation (Borduas, Pellan, etc.) and the abstract painters of the following generation (Jauran, Molinari, Juneau, etc.). Across the surface of “Jeune fille au chandail jaune”, which palpitates under countless brushstrokes, we notice the omnipresence of the diagonal lines which define the neck, the collar of the vest, the shoulders and the skirt; a few horizontal lines (bottom of the vest and sleeves) and slight curves (chin, hands) soften the pointed shapes. As for the colour palette — composed of bistre for the background, brown for the skirt, black for the hair, and flesh colour for the face, neck and hands – it emphasizes the warm, luminous yellow of the sweater, which gives the painting its title.
Rea Montbizon, a critic for “The Gazette” in January 1965, wondered why Lemieux’s paintings were some of the most popular on the Canadian market today: “Why? Is it because the painter is a humanist, because his pictures allude to the human condition in general, leaving room for individual identification? Or because they idealize nature, evoking nostalgic memories of the viewer’s own pleasurable encounters with her? Or is it because his work is free of cruelty and conflict? Or because it is agreeable to look at?”. All of these questions can be answered affirmatively.
We know today that popular enthusiasm dried up after Lemieux's “classical period”. His artistic production between 1970 and his death in 1990 is described as “Expressionist”. Imbued with tragedy, this period corresponds to the existential crisis which affected Lemieux at the end of his life: tormented by the future of humanity, he painted figures which expressed immense dismay, like the young woman in “Tourné vers le cosmos” (1980–1985, Musée national des beaux–arts du Québec), like the young woman who looks up towards the night sky faintly lit by starlight.
Recently, several paintings of solitary figures, created by Lemieux in the late 1950s and early 1960s, have reappeared on the art market. Collectors have kept them away from public view for approximately sixty years. “Jeune fille au chandail jaune” adds another one of Jean Paul Lemieux’s cast of characters and contributes to a better understanding of the impact generated by this great Quebec painter who worked in complete isolation.
We extend our thanks to Dr. Michèle Grandbois, Canadian art historian, for her assistance in researching this artwork and for contributing the preceding essay.
