JEAN PAUL LEMIEUX (1904 - 1990)

×

Expand

"Jeune fille au chandail jaune"

Jean Paul Lemieux, "Jeune fille au chandail jaune," 1964, oil on canvas, 55" x 26".

Notable at home and abroad for his powerful works reflecting the tender emotions of solitude and despair, Quebec artist Jean Paul Lemieux’s landscapes, cities, people and faces are instantly recognizable. “I have no theories and like everyone else who paints I am never satisfied,” he once said about his work. “I am especially interested in conveying the solitude of man and the ever-flowing passage of time. I try to express this silence in which we all move.”

Born in Quebec City in 1904, Lemieux studied at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Montreal and taught for many years at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Quebec City. He became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1956, received the Order of Canada in 1968, and in 1974 he was awarded the Canada Council Molson Prize. In 2002 an exhibition called Jean Paul Lemieux – His Canada was held at the IXth Summit of La Francophonie in Beirut, Lebanon. The show featured 12 works created for a series of postal stamps representing each province and territory. Lemieux died in Quebec in 1990.

This painting, Jeune fille au chandail jaune, scores a “10 out of 10” for a work by Lemieux, says Rod Green of Masters Gallery in Calgary, who acquired it for $195,000 in Summer 2004 from a private collection in Quebec and almost immediately resold it to an undisclosed buyer. “Lemieux painted it in the early half of the 1960s, at the height of his career, and the subject matter – a solitary, monochromatic figure – is exactly the type of work with which Lemieux is identified,” says Green.