He remains the only Canadian artist commonly referred to only by his surname and the first to create a work that sold for more than $1 million, and his fame transcends Canada’s linguistic divide. Now the centenary of Jean Paul Riopelle’s birth is celebrated with a wide range of events.
Some tributes are unusual, such as the commemorative coin released by the Royal Canadian Mint last month. The federal government is providing C$1.3 million for nine artistic events across the country, including exhibitions, performances and residencies. Robert Lepage’s “Le Projet Riopelle,” now presented in Quebec City and moving to Ottawa next month, is a four-hour-plus performance based on the enormous fresco Riopelle created when he learned of the death of Joan Mitchell, the painter and his old partner.
The centennial events, all of which can be found in a calendar put together by the Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation, will continue well into next year.
The one event likely to draw the biggest crowd is “Riopelle: Crossroads in Time,” a retrospective that recently opened at the National Gallery of Canada and will travel to the Winnipeg Art Gallery in June.
The large and enthusiastic crowd that turned out on opening night may have been a turning point for the National Gallery. As my colleague Norimitsu Onishi recently wrote, the National Gallery has been particularly roiled by the push to “decolonize” museums.
Read: Unrest engulfs Canadian art museums as they try to rid themselves of their colonial past
Although dominated by a chronology of Riopelle’s works in various media, the exhibition is also interspersed with works by other artists, both currently active and his contemporaries, who were influenced by him.
To bring a new perspective to the exhibition, the National Gallery sought to curate Sylvie Lacerte, an art historian from Sutton, Quebec, who previously lived in New York. Although an expert in contemporary art, Dr. Lacerte had not previously studied Riopelle.
We spoke earlier this week. These highlights from our conversation have been edited for length and clarity.
Was it a herculean task to tackle a big project, outside of your previous experience?
The museum wanted to have a different voice, a different view of Riopelle’s practice and career. And so of course I had to do an incredible amount of research before I could start selecting works.
I read and read and read. Then I visited the institutions and private collectors from whom we wanted to borrow some, to see the works with my own eyes.
I was always discovering new things. Some of his works look very fresh, as if they were created only a few years ago.
He was a pioneer from the start when he started in the 1950s and never wanted to get comfortable and sit on his laurels.
His style changed. He explored many media. That’s what I wanted to show: the diversity of his practice.
His energetic early paintings are sometimes compared to it Jackson Pollock’s works. Is that fair?
These things were in the spirit of the times at the time and they exhibited together in Paris in collective exhibitions. But they didn’t talk to each other much.
Yes, there are similarities, and the purists at Riopelle don’t like that. But we can make a connection. But it wasn’t that one copied the other or vice versa. Not at all.
What was his working style?
He took long pauses between the explosions of creation.
He used an all-encompassing style, because whenever he was in his studios, the paint would extend far beyond the frame of the painting. He had paint all over the walls, ceiling, windows and floor.
His period of creation was so intense that at one point the man needed a break. But there are about 6,000 to 7,000 works in his corpus across all media, and he worked continuously until – until 1992. So it was an incredible journey.
Why did he become so famous in both French and English-speaking Canada?
Riopelle became the first Canadian artist to achieve international status in the post-war era. People all over Canada were very proud of that. And you can see that in the various collections from institutions across Canada.
And he was friends with Giacometti, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kline. So he was part of an all-star cast, to put it vulgarly perhaps.
Furthermore, he never categorized himself as a nationalist or federalist. He kept saying that he was apolitical and that politics did not interest him.
Trans-Canada
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