Sans titre, 1964

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

Marcelle Ferron’s Sans titre of 1964 is an exceptional painting from an exceptional episode in the artist’s six-decade-long career. Its size, brilliance, and unity are a high point from when she was regularly attaining new heights and artistic growth. Her control of colour and paint enabled her to make a painting in which the traces of its making and bold demonstration of colour are laid before us.

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.