Sans titre, 1965

Gordon and Carol Schacter 

Masters Gallery, Calgary 

Private Collection, Calgary

The Desire to Acquire: London Collects, Museum London, 3 September–8 January 2017

Cassandra Getty and Barry Fair, The Desire to Acquire: London Collects, London, 2017, reproduced page 68 

Remembering Rita Letendre, AGOinsider [online publication], Art Gallery of Ontario, 26 June 2017, accessed 10 April 2025

Beginning as an Automatiste painter in the 1950s, Rita Letendre was influenced by Paul-Émile Borduas’ revolutionary gestural abstract paintings of the period. Although the Automatistes were instrumental in the evolution of her style, Letendre developed a singular vision in her body of work that resulted in a unique style that pushed boundaries of colour, light and space. Dramatic and evocative, Sans titre, dating to 1965, was completed during a pivotal period of growth in Letendre’s career. Her compositions grew more personal and carefully planned, and she began anchoring masses with carefully visualized gestures amid fields of thick impasto. After winning first prize in the Concours de la Jeune Peinture in 1959 and the Prix Rodolphe-de-Repentigny in 1960, the prize and the additional sales that followed would allow Letendre to dedicate herself to painting full-time. 

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. Sans titre features a black mass pushing down toward the lower left quadrant of the picture with vibrant red splashing up the sides of the mass. Letendre 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.”