signed and dated 1957 lower right; titled on the stretcher on the reverse
28 × 22 in (71.1 × 55.9 cm)
The Fine Art Galleries, T. Eaton Co., Toronto
Private Collection
Joyner Waddington's, auction, Toronto, 23-24 November 2004, lot 109
Private Collection, Toronto
As a high school student in Quebec City in the 1940s, Marcella Maltais enrolled in Saturday art classes at the École des beaux-arts de Québec, where she met Jean Paul Lemieux. In 1949 she worked an office job while taking night classes taught by Jean-Philippe Dallaire, who motivated her to pursue painting as a career. Throughout the early 1950s Maltais rented a studio and showed her work in local group exhibitions in Quebec and the Charlevoix region. A major shift in Maltais’s career occurred in 1955, when she moved to Montreal and encountered the Automatistes and other avant-garde artists including Guido Molinari, Claude Tousignant, Marcelle Ferron and Rita Letendre.
Les pas retrouvés was completed in 1957, shortly following her move and transformation from figurative painting to abstraction. With its spontaneous, ‘all-over’ brushwork, it demonstrates the influence of the Automatistes and other artistic peers. Characterized by expressive gestures, organic forms and dynamic colour, her paintings from this period reflect an increasingly assured and individual style. During the same year, Maltais showed her works alongside François Soucy at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as well as with Armand Vaillancourt at Galerie Denyse Delrue in Montreal. She quickly became recognized as one of the most talented young painters of Quebec. Maltais moved to Paris in the following year, marking the beginning of an extended period of living and working abroad.
