Sans titre, 1959 by Marcelle Ferron

Provenance:
Masters Gallery, Calgary
Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg
Private Collection

Bold textures, vibrant hues, and constant motion characterize this abstract by Marcelle Ferron, painted at the height of her creativity. Almost seventy years old, the painting’s freshness and visual appeal are a testament to the staying power of Ferron’s work and of the expressive form of abstraction that she practiced.

The variety of hues, textures, and animated forms in this painting is truly special. While there are dominant emphases, no colour or shape commands the surface. Reds are prominent, for example, but a close look reveals that they are not the same reds across the painting, nor are they repetitive in shape or texture. Adding to the sense of flux here, pigments are dragged through and into one another, some in a robust impasto manipulated with a palette knife, others with a delicate, almost transparent skein. In company with many prominent artists in Montréal in the 1940s, Ferron was mentored and directly influenced by perhaps the most significant painter in Canada of this generation, Paul-Émile Borduas. She was an active member of "Les Automatistes" in Montréal from 1946 and signed the 1948 manifesto "Refus global" (“Total Refusal”) that Borduas initiated. We can see his signature in her use of heavily built-up whites in "Sans titre". These areas suggest a perimeter for Ferron’s explosions of form and colour, but they are equal to one another and to the painting’s other forms in their texture, their physical presence. White is, therefore, not a background but rather a hue among others.

"Refus global" was a call to liberate artistic and cultural expression, both personally and in the province. Such changes often entailed a departure in more than artistic style. In 1953, Ferron moved to Paris, where she was active in a supportive community of expatriates, most notably Jean Paul Riopelle. Like him, she was favoured by the French avant-garde. Exhibiting in both France and Montreal from the mid-1950s on, Ferron returned to Québec in 1966.

While a painting cannot truly look forward in an artist’s trajectory, today it seems right to think about Ferron’s later mastery of stained glass when we see "Sans titre". In France she had learned advanced stained-glass techniques from artist Michel Blum. In Montreal after her time in Europe, Ferron expanded her pictorial ideas into stained glass at Expo ’67’s International Trade Centre and in the spectacular roof of the Champ-de-Mars metro station (installed in 1968, the first non-figurative art in the Montreal’s metro system was controversial amongst city officials at the time). She also designed the towering stained-glass Permanent Memorial for the Six Million Jewish Martyrs of the Nazi Holocaust for Concordia University in Montreal (1970). In 1983, she was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas. Ferron became a Grand Officer of the Ordre national du Québec in 2000. Accolades and awards notwithstanding, however, Ferron’s considerable legacy abides in her passionate yet delicate paintings and her ability to expand their appealing aesthetic into public art.

We extend our thanks to Mark A. Cheetham for contributing the preceding essay. Mark is the author of two books on abstract art: "The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting" and "Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the ‘60s". He is a professor of Art History at the University of Toronto and an independent curator and art writer.