If there is a Quebec painter who left his mark in France, it is Jean Paul Riopelle. Some will remember the shock experienced in the 1980s by someone who visited the Beaubourg permanent collection and discovered that it opened with a monumental work by the Quebec painter. On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, it was therefore normal for France to put the small dishes in the big ones. Not only did Riopelle spend half his life in France, but it was there that he produced most of his work.
After the vast Quebec program, which mobilizes several museums and institutions, France will not be outdone. Tuesday, at the Canadian Cultural Center in Paris, the Riopelle Foundation unveiled the content of this commemorative year. “It’s sort of a homecoming, said Manon Gauthier, president of the said foundation, since it is here that Riopelle arrived at the end of the 1940s and where he found glory. »
The year will be inaugurated in Saint-Paul de Vence, in the south of France, where the Maeght Foundation will present the exhibition Workshop perfume. It is the artist’s own daughter, Yseult Riopelle, author of a catalog raisonné listing 7,000 works by her father, who is the guest curator. From 1er July to November 12, we will discover more than 180 works, from the best known to the most unpublished. In a journey that will follow the thread of the various workshops of the painter on the two continents, the visitor will be able to admire in addition canvases, bronzes, ceramics, porcelain, tapestries and even various objects, such as “string games” or Inuit glasses made by the artist.
“People are familiar with the large series of canvases, but we have never shown his work on such a scale,” says Yseult Riopelle. The highlight of this exhibition will be the sets that Jean Paul Riopelle had imagined in 1967 for a ballet by Merce Cunningham. Never made, they will be mounted for the first time and they will be used individually Passage by French dancer and choreographer Noé Soulier.
Since 1947 and the international exhibition of the surrealists, Jean Paul Riopelle had maintained a very close relationship with the Maeght family, which runs the largest private foundation in France for contemporary art. A foundation that inspired the artist when creating his own. Aimé Maeght was notably a personal friend of Riopelle with whom he shared not only a passion for art, but also those for hunting and old cars.
At the Pompidou Center
In the fall, it is at the Center Georges Pompidou that Riopelle in France will culminate this year. The National Museum of Modern Art will be offering a tribute exhibition in November allowing visitors to admire the seven major works it owns, including Chevreuse (1954), Mid-summer at Georges (1973), michikanabikong (1975), and several works on paper. Many borrowings from other collections will be added. The exhibition should make it possible to introduce Riopelle’s more recent production to a public that is above all familiar with his early works.
The last Riopelle exhibition at the Center Pompidou dates from 1981. “We want to place this major figure in gestural abstraction back in the history of post-war painting,” says Xavier Rey, director of the Center Pompidou. And there is no better story to tell about this period than that of this Canadian artist who came to settle in France. »
Associated with Riopelle this year, the French-language channel TV5 Monde will deploy a special program. As part of the show 400 million reviews, it will produce three one-hour programs dedicated to Jean Paul Riopelle on the premises of the Maeght Foundation. Its Internet platform will offer the series Riopelle in courts including five short films directed by young Quebec filmmakers and recently presented at the International Festival of Films on Art.
For Philippe Piguet, art critic and personal friend of Riopelle, this Riopelle year will allow “rediscovering a strong work and a major artist, certainly known in France, but of which young artists do not always take the measure”. Piguet had the chance to visit Riopelle in his workshop in Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson in the Laurentians. “It was always a party,” he says.
Riopelle offers a unique example for today’s artists, adds Xavier Rey. “Many are interested in this interstice between abstraction and figuration. Precisely because he never wanted to choose, Riopelle charted his own course. He simply said: I paint what I see. »