Arbre du Ténéré, 1962

Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg Private Collection, Vancouver

Marcelle Ferron was a pioneer of abstraction and public stained glass installations in Quebec. On the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth, it is fitting to honour her contributions and to experience the lasting power of her painting anew. Ferron enjoyed considerable acclaim in Quebec and internationally during her lifetime. She was a central member of the Montreal avant- garde group "Les Automatistes" from 1946. Alongside the leader of this group and her mentor, Paul-Émile Borduas, and with other leading reformers, Ferron was a signatory to the 1948 manifesto "Refus global" (“Global Refusal”). The document was a powerful call to unfetter and modernize artistic, cultural, and social expression in the province. Like so many fellow artists at this juncture, Ferron left Quebec for Paris, where she lived from 1953 to 1966. She received the silver medal at the Biennale of São Paulo, Brazil in 1961 and was named Grand Officer of the Ordre national du Quebec in 2000. Ferron was the first woman to be awarded the Paul-Émile Borduas Prize in 1983. Ferron’s pedigree should not distract us from the radicality of her work, its liberatory purpose and its lasting effect. Painted in France, "Arbre du Ténéré" is typical of the concentrated yet joyful intensity of her abstract painting. A remarkably varied kaleidoscope of colourful forms dance irrepressibly across the surface. The tonal range is equally dramatic, yet no element, no dark or light or saturated colour dominates. "Arbre du Ténéré" reminds us of the power of expressive abstract painting to embody resistance not only to aesthetic conventions but also to personal and social restraints. We can readily perceive this effect within the frame, so to speak, experiencing only the formal aspects of the painting. But what of Ferron’s evocative title? Like many abstract artists in the mid-20th century, she often resorted to the placeholder ‘sans titre,’ perhaps to underline that we should dwell on what we can see in a painting rather than follow the literary implications of its title. Yet ‘L'Arbre du Ténare[sic]’ must also allude to a world-famous tree, the Tree of Ténéré in the desert of Niger in Africa. Until it was hit by a car and felled in 1973, this ancient acacia tree was a monument to solitary survival. For generations, it was the only tree in hundreds of square kilometres of the Sahara Desert. The renowned tree was still living when Ferron painted this work, leading us to wonder why she titled this painting as she did. It would be too literal to think that she depicted the tree, but we can imagine a connection between what we see in the painting itself and the tenacity and living dynamism of abstraction, and of art generally, in the world. Mark A. Cheetham has written extensively on Canadian artists, including Jack Chambers, Alex Colville, Robert Houle, and Camille Turner, most recently in the collection "Unsettling Canadian Art History" (2022). He is a freelance writer and curator and a professor of Art History at the University of Toronto.