Sans titre, 1964 by Marcelle Ferron
Marcelle Ferron
Sans titre, 1964
oil on canvas
signed and dated 1964 lower left; dated 1964 to a gallery label on the reverse
45 x 57.25 in ( 114.3 x 145.4 cm )
Auction Estimate: $300,000.00 - $400,000.00
Price Realized $696,000.00
Sale date: May 28th 2025
Gallery Moos, Toronto, Ontario
Robert Cliche and Madeleine Ferron, Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce, Quebec
Canadian Art Group, Toronto
Mayberry Fine Art, Toronto/Winnipeg
Private Collection
"Marcelle Ferron de 1945 à 1970", Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal, 8 April-31 May 1970, no. 76
"Marcelle Ferron: The Paris Years 1953-1966", Mayberry Fine Art, Toronto, 26 October-29 November 2019
Herta Wescher and Laurent Lamy, "Marcelle Ferron de 1945 à 1970", Montreal, 1970, no. 76
Marcelle Ferron, "L'Esquisse d'une mémoire", Montreal, 1996, page 93
Patricia Smart, 'L'automatisme: Un lieu d’égalité pour les femmes?', "Vie des arts", vol. 42, no. 170 (Spring 1998), page 43
Gregory Humeniuk in "Marcelle Ferron: The Paris Years 1953-1966", Toronto/Winnipeg, 2019, reproduced page 16
Ferron began her art studies in Quebec City with Jean Paul Lemieux in 1942 when she was eighteen. Dissatisfied, she left and studied with Paul-Émile Borduas in Montreal from 1945 to 1948. Borduas’s openness as a teacher, and the centrality of the individual to his thought shaped Ferron’s artistic and personal ethoses. In her mid-twenties, she was a signatory to the revolutionary "Refus Global" (1948) and the last painter to join the artistically and culturally radical Automatistes. Defying Quebec’s repressive cultural authorities could cost one their job. It cost Borduas his almost immediately, and personal convictions cost many of the Automatistes, Ferron among them. In 1953 she sailed to France with her three young children to escape repression at home, and in the process opened herself to new opportunities. Amid the difficult conditions in post war France was a milieu of ambitious artists making and showing bold work unlike anything in Canada. This began thirteen years of intense development for Ferron. Over time, it became apparent the thrust of her abstraction was the manifestation of light that would underpin the rest of her œuvre, including later work with stained glass.
In Paris, in a community of ambitious international painters, Ferron knew and admired the American painter Sam Francis, whose paintings of the middle and late 1950s illuminate Ferron’s compositions of the early 1960s. Francis’s active surfaces, resolute use of white, and vibrating light create impressions inspired by Claude Monet’s late paintings of water lilies. Ferron gleaned from Francis and Borduas separately and created material-based painting of shimmering light like "Sans titre" that are entirely her own. Her interest in light distinguished her from her peers and spanned her œuvre. This singularity shone amongst Borduas’s breakthroughs into the materiality of paint and Jean Paul Riopelle’s breakthroughs into facture and surface. She gleaned from Borduas that paint is always material, not a tool for mimicking the visible world, and that its materiality could be the content of a painting. It never disappeared from her art, and among her paintings its eloquent fusion in "Sans titre" parallels the effects of the stained glass with which she was working by 1964. Ferron’s Paris paintings of 1953 to 1966 elicit rare pleasures. They are direct and they cut through fussy rhetoric just like Emily Carr’s gasoline-diluted oil on kraft paper landscapes of the middle and late 1930s, Jean Paul Riopelle’s paintings of 1952-1954, and Ron Martin’s one-colour paintings of the early 1970s in which light radiates out and over the viewer. Sans titre erupts toward the viewer with sheets of grey punctuated with alizarin crimson, cadmium orange, cobalt green, purple lake and ultramarine like many of Ferron’s paintings of the first half of the 1960s. In "Sans titre" the vertical slashes of cobalt green leavened with white flutter across the surface, making it distinctly engaging and satisfying among Ferron’s most accomplished and important paintings.
We extend our thanks to Gregory Humeniuk, independent art historian, curator and consultant, for contributing the preceding essay.
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Marcelle Ferron
(1924 - 2001) Les Automatistes, RCA
Marcelle Ferron was born in Louiseville, Quebec, in 1924. At the age of seven she lost her mother and her father moved the family to the country, hoping the rural environment would be good for his children. Ferron suffered from tuberculosis in early childhood and frequent stays in the hospital forged in her an independent spirit.
Following high school, she studied at the college Marguerite-Bourgeois and then registered at the Quebec Ecole des Beaux-arts. Ferron quit before finishing her studies, finding that the instruction did not fit her idea of modern art. After a few years of experimentation she met Paul-Emile Borduas. He became her mentor and introduced her to a new abstract style of painting. Under his tutelage, Ferron formulated an approach to painting which allowed her to express her own personal vision. In 1946 she joined the group of painters known as the Automatistes. She exhibited with them and began to gain recognition in the art world. When the Automatiste group disbanded in 1953, Marcelle Ferron decided to move to France.
She separated from her husband and left for France with her three daughters. She settled in Clamart, a suburb of Paris, where she lived and kept her studio. She concentrated on painting, making this a very productive period. Full of light, her strong abstract works caught the attention of gallery owners and influential figures in the French art world. Among these was Herta Wescher, who helped her to organize exhibits throughout Europe. In Paris, Ferron also made connections with many other artists, such as Leon Bellefleur and Jean-Paul Riopelle. The period she spent in France was extremely significant for her career as a painter. When she returned to Quebec in 1966 she was an internationally-known artist.
Back in Quebec she met the glass maker, Michel Blum. She found that working with glass allowed her to explore light and colour more fully. In collaboration with a team of glass technicians, she invented a method that allowed her to build walls of light. She inserted antique coloured glass between sheets of clear glass, perfecting a method by which the joints were made invisibly. Her first major glass achievement was the mural for Expo 67. However, it was the glass wall that she created for the Champ-de-Mars metro station that made her known to the Quebec public. These works lead to many glass art commissions for public spaces. During this period Marcelle Ferron also taught architecture and art at the University Laval. She returned to painting around 1985.
In 1983, she was the first woman to receive the Prix Paul-Emile-Borduas. Among her other honours was the silver medal she won at the Sao Paolo Biennieal in Brazil in 1961. The Government of Quebec recognized her contribution to Quebec culture with the Ordre national du Quebec. It should be noted that Marcelle Ferron was an early feminist who, with daring, faced and overcame many obstacles. A woman of integrity, she was devoted to her art, insisting that she did not paint for collectors. Painting, rather, was her passion. She broke ground for women artists in Canada today.
Marcelle Ferron died in 2001. The famous Quebec writers, Jacques Ferron and Madeleine Ferron are her brother and sister.
