On October 30, 1992, when his daughter Yseult called him from Paris to announce the death of his former companion, Joan Mitchell, Jean Paul Riopelle locked himself in a small house in L’Isle-aux-Grues, near Montmagny. On an elongated table, he unfolds a large canvas, which he will ultimately never cut. And he paints thirty vignettes, a kind of work-testament. Theset Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg.
This painting-river serves as a framework for another work-river, The Riopelle project, which is showing at Duceppe in a production by Robert Lepage. A play that lasts four and a half hours and which features dozens of characters unfolding on two continents. Inspired by the vignettes of Tribute to Rosa Luxemburgwhere coded messages are hidden, it is the life of Jean Paul Riopelle that will take shape on stage, from his beginnings as a student of Paul-Émile Borduas, at the École du Meubles de Montréal, to the death of Joan Mitchell, Passing by Global denial and 40 years of prosperity in Europe.
” In Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, it’s not just geese. There are symbols. There’s a pool cue, lots of props, dead animals,” says the director.
A mysterious painter
To render it all, Robert Lepage used ten actors, including Luc Picard, who successively played Jean Paul Riopelle and his master, Paul-Émile Borduas, and Anne-Marie Cadieux, in the role of Joan Mitchell. Gabriel Lemire and Noémie O’Farell play young Riopelle and Mitchell, respectively.
For Luc Picard, the character of Riopelle remains mysterious, elusive. “He didn’t open up a lot publicly, he says, and he didn’t open up a lot in his painting. “However, in the intimacy, we see him joking, he says. It also happened that Riopelle combed napkins when he received guests for dinner. “He was charming,” he said.
Around them will rise a whole series of characters, from the skewer of artists frequented in Paris – the painter Alberto Giacometti, the playwright Samuel Beckett, the writer André Breton – to Huguette Vachon, the last spouse of Riopelle, until the guardian of the dogs for whom he finally left Joan Mitchell after 24 years together.
What is unveiled here is a relationship between two sacred monsters, says Anne-Marie Cadieux. “It was a very tumultuous relationship between two artists with strong personalities who were very free. He drank too. So everyone said you shouldn’t get in between. »
When they met in Paris, it was Riopelle who was the most famous. Then Joan Mitchell gradually took her place, until her fame surpassed that of Riopelle on the international scene.
A French painter?
Finally, reports Robert Lepage, it is the disease alone which will recall Jean Paul Riopelle to Quebec. There, he met Champlain Charest, a restaurant owner and patron, who set up a workshop for him in the Laurentians, and who took him to visit the Far North aboard his private plane.
“They were flying around, and Riopelle was saying to Charest, ‘Just keep going towards the sun.’ And all he was doing was looking at the ground, watching how the light was falling on the ground and on the ice. There was a good period when he was fascinated by that, ”says Luc Picard.
For Robert Lepage, however, Jean Paul Riopelle, if he was born in Quebec, is more of a “French painter” than anything else. Moreover, it evolved far from the political causes that mobilized Quebec. “He made fun of Marcelle Ferron who distributed leaflets for the PQ,” he recalls. In fact, the automatists who signed the Global denial were first influenced by a manifesto drawn up in France by André Breton’s group.
“There is a kind of manifesto that Breton signed: Inaugural break, continues Robert Lepage. He asked Riopelle to sign the automatists in Quebec. This is where Riopelle would have said: “why would we sign that?” It attacked Stalinism, a vision of communism in which the surrealists did not find themselves. “Why don’t we write our own manifesto? We have problems with the Church, with all the self-righteous people, the intelligentsia who don’t understand what we’re doing. Censorship.” »
Robert Lepage conducted extensive research for this piece, which he has been working on for four years. In the documents, of course, but also by meeting his friends, his family, his relatives. In particular, he made discoveries about Rosa Luxemburg, a communist activist who inspired Riopelle. “We discovered a writing by Rosa Luxemburg where she identifies herself with a goose,” he says. For Robert Lepage, Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg is a testamentary work, even though it survived it by ten years.
On occasion, Jean Paul Riopelle called Joan Mitchell “Rosa Malheur”, as opposed to Rosa Bonheur, a French animal painter of the 19th century.e century. In addition, Joan Mitchell liked to paint to the sound of Edith Piaf’s song. Through rose-colored glasses. This is also the name she gave to a large painting produced after her breakup with Riopelle.
“The day Joan Mitchell died, he said, ‘All the Rosas are dead.’ recalls Robert Lepage. They will be reborn at Duceppe, for the duration of a show.