Jean Paul Riopelle: Crossroads in Time

The importance of being an icon

by

The new Jean Paul Riopelle retrospective, Riopelle: Crossroads in Time, at the National Gallery of Canada attempts to show how the influence of this tremendously successful Quebec artist, who died in 2002, is still coursing through the veins of Canadian contemporary artists.

And so, amid 130 of Riopelle’s spectacular mosaic abstract paintings from the 1950s, his late-in-life, semi-abstract aerosol-sprayed snow geese and everything in between, a surprising cast of contemporary artists also appears on the gallery walls celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.

The gallery says there is a “kinship” between Riopelle’s abstracted works on paper of Greenland shelters made of whalebones, each called Le Roi de Thulé, and the lifelike, giant whale skeleton, Vienna, created by B.C. artist Brian Jungen in 2003 from white plastic lawn chairs.

A “kinship?” Really? Sometimes it feels like the gallery is trying too hard to convince us Riopelle is an important influencer.

Likewise, we are told, Riopelle’s iceberg paintings are echoed in Caroline Monnet’s multimedia work The Future Left Behind from 2021, presenting a bird’s eye view of a northern village. The Quebec-based Monnet is currently the It-Girl of Canadian Indigenous art, her work popping up everywhere. In a catalogue essay, Monnet discusses how Riopelle was a role model for her when she was young. But as she matured, she lost interest in Riopelle because his work from the Arctic was like Group of Seven paintings — “devoid of human presence.” The North’s Indigenous people were erased.

More of a case can be made for “kinship” between Riopelle and Françoise Sullivan, another Quebec artist marking the centenary of her birth this year, except Sullivan, at 100, is still kicking and painting and has a new exhibition this fall at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She and Riopelle share more than a birth year. They were both signatories of the artworld’s anti-establishment Refus global in 1948, a document credited with helping Quebec emerge from “The Great Darkness” of the Duplessis era. Sullivan’s lively abstract on view at the National Gallery, Triptych, 2021, definitely echos the fat, worm-like squiggles found in Riopelle’s Couple Ficelles, 1972.

Sylvie Lacerte, the independent curator who organized the exhibition, Riopelle: Crossroads in Time, calls the artist an “icon.” But is he a “national icon?” Well, he is definitely a Quebec icon but in the rest of Canada he has not captured the public imagination in the way Tom Thomson, Emily Carr or Alex Colville have.

In Quebec, Riopelle exhibitions were held in many galleries this year to mark the centenary of his birth. Michel Cheff, who curated a Riopelle exhibition at Galerie Montcalm in Gatineau, Que., this past summer, says Quebecers are dazzled by Riopelle’s international success and by his reputation as a “wild man.” He once burned a pile of his own paintings when he ran out of fuel for his fireplace in a Paris apartment. In France, surrealist painter André Breton nicknamed Riopelle “the peerless trapper.” The name stuck. The “wild man” mythology lingers.

In English Canada, there were no Riopelle exhibitions of note this year, except for this one at the National Gallery, which continues until April 7 and then moves to the Winnipeg Art Gallery from June 1 to Sept. 29, next year.

Publicity about the centenary was extremely muted outside of Quebec, in part, because the Riopelle Foundation, which holds the copyright of the artist’s work, made it extremely difficult for magazines and newspapers to obtain the rights to print an image of ANY Riopelle painting.

The foundation, with a board containing millionaire collectors, lobbied the National Gallery to organize this centenary exhibition. Sasha Suda, the gallery director during the lobbying period, only reluctantly agreed, according to some of the millionaires.

All this politicking and division among “les deux solitudes” should not prevent one from thoroughly enjoying the Riopelle retrospective, the first one at the National Gallery since 1963.

The early-career mosaics alone are worth the trip. They were often done with a palette knife, the paint at times squeezed from tubes directly onto the canvas. These abstracts, looking like finely detailed stained glass windows, are beloved by the art establishment, inside and outside Quebec. Today they sell for millions of dollars apiece.

The exhibition is divided so that each room offers a different decade of Riopelle’s oeuvre. The 1940s were Riopelle’s automatist period and the 1950s were best defined by the mosaic paintings. On and on it goes, ending in the 1990s with more figurative scenes of wild geese ready to fly off the wall.

Viewing his masterpiece Hommage aux Nymphéas – Pavane, a 1954 triptych paying homage to Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, is like being in the presence of the sacred. The triptych pulls you from earth into the heavens. And yes, there is a “kinship” between Riopelle’s abstracts and Monet’s Impressionist paintings in the way both used light and colour and the way both created paintings that will long be adored by their fans and considered important. ■

Riopelle: Crossroads in Time is at the National Gallery of Canada from Oct. 27 until April 7 and then moves to the Winnipeg Art Gallery from June 1 to Sept. 29 next year.

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.

NationalGallery2.png

National Gallery of Canada

380 Sussex Drive P.O. Box 427, Station A, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 9N4

613-990-1985

Visit Website