A strong and free-spirited woman, painter Rita Letendre passed away in Toronto on Saturday, November 20, at the age of 93, following a long illness. In the past year alone, the artist had been the subject of two exhibitions in Rimouski. Four of his works are currently featured at BYDealers.
“It’s sad that she couldn’t see that,” said her only son, Jacques Letendre yesterday. The fact remains that Rita Letendre has had enormous success as a painter throughout her career.
Born in Drummondville in 1928, Rita Letendre was part of the movement of Quebec Automatists, even though she was too young to be a signatory of Global refusal. It was at the Montreal School of Fine Arts that she met Paul-Émile Borduas. “Immediately after the publication of Global refusal, Borduas had taken it under his wing, ”says his gallery owner, Simon Blais.
From the mid-1950s, moreover, Rita Letendre had the right to individual exhibitions.
“She was able to live from her painting almost from the start,” continues her son Jacques Letendre, who, for his part, was brought up by his grandparents. She absolutely didn’t want to do anything else. When she sold a painting, she took some money to buy food and the rest to buy painting. One day, I asked him why his early paintings were darker, while there was more light in the following ones. She replied “red and yellow are so expensive, I had to wait for the money”. “
Like a Marcelle Ferron or a Françoise Sullivan, Rita Letendre was part of a small group of women artists who succeeded in establishing themselves in the world of visual arts, at a time when the place of women was not guaranteed.
The light
“Everything revolved around light,” continues Simon Blais, about the work of Rita Letendre. After having started at the easel, Rita Letendre made great use of the aerosol painter, to return to easel painting during the 1980s. 1980s, she will see her produce a set of paintings and pastel drawings of great singularity, a sort of return to the painting which had made her reputation in the 1960s, with the maturity of an artist of international career ”, reads -on in the obituary dedicated to him by the Simon Blais gallery.
In Toronto, where she lived with her husband, Israeli sculptor Kosso Eloul, Rita Letendre painted several murals. On the ceiling of Glencairn metro station, she creates the work Joy, a stained glass window 55 meters long painted with aerosol. She also paints the wall of a university in Los Angeles.
In Toronto, the Letendre and Eloul couple are at the center of artistic life, underlines Simon Blais. In 2004, after the death of her husband, Rita Letendre tried to return to Quebec, before returning to settle in Toronto, where she lived her last days.
Suffering from serious sight problems, Rita Letendre continued to paint as much as she could, until about 2015, “She had the memory of the gesture”, remembers Simon Blais.
Of Abenaki origin through her grandmother, Rita Letendre never made much of her Aboriginal identity. “She defined herself as an artist and didn’t like to be labeled,” says her son.