In the visual arts, we have had some great artists, despite the difficulty for these women to impose themselves in a world of men. There is always among us Françoise Sullivan (1923), but there was Marcelle Ferron (1924-2001), Rita Letendre (1928-2021), Kittie Bruneau (1929-2021), Lise Gervais (1933-1998), Betty Goodwin (1923-2008) and Francine Simonin (1936-2020). To this list, we must now add the name of Raymonde Godin (1930-2023), who passed away on January 31.
She lived in the small town of Suze-la-Rousse, in the Drôme, from where she contemplated her Mont Ventoux. In 2020, the Soulages Museum, in Rodez, devoted a major exhibition to women artists of the 1950s, featuring Raymonde Godin prominently. And last year, she exhibited solo at the Convergences gallery in Paris. She is little known here, even in the narrow circle of contemporary art. It is true that she left Quebec in 1954, without setting foot there again for 28 years, in order to pursue her career in Europe.
However, the young Raymonde Godin was well integrated into the very small Montreal art scene of the time. She studied at the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She frequented the three or four essential places, such as the Librairie Tranquille and the café L’Échouerie, on the avenue des Pins.
His getaways to New York with an aunt who worked at the UN introduced him to the incredible diversity of painting. So she decided to flee to Paris to learn more. A few days before her departure, the art critic and artist Rodolphe de Repentigny (1928-1959), with whom she was dining, captured a last portrait of her.
Upon her arrival in Paris, she met Paul Kallos (1928-2001), a young Hungarian painter who survived Auschwitz. It’s love at first sight, and only death will separate them. Kallos was then under contract with the famous merchant Pierre Loeb (1897-1964), who launched Riopelle’s career. She therefore enters through the front door into the world of Parisian art. The Portuguese artist Vieira da Silva (1908-1992), also defended by Loeb, became her protector in this world of men.
What does Raymonde Godin’s painting look like? It’s always about space. In her first Parisian paintings, she offers us the compressed spaces of her studio, nested paintings where she sought to lead us elsewhere. In 1961, his departure from Saint-Germain-des-Prés for the suburb of L’Haÿ-Les-Roses quietly opened up his space to literally push him out the window. His great period of glory followed in the 1980s and 1990s, when the painting was the space of a writing, the painting was a sign.
In recent years, when September returned, sometimes Raymonde Godin returned to the sweetest season of the country of her childhood, when the light declines, the vegetation resists and makes a last stand by igniting. In the slow agony of this dense vegetation, space opens up. Raymonde Godin was fascinated by this metamorphosis of space which goes from an impenetrable density to an almost disappearance once the snow comes. Vegetation sets the tone for this transformation, and this is what Raymonde Godin has tried to capture in her latest works.
In Europe, nature is civilized. There are no more wild forests. They exist by the will of man. With us, the word “wild” still has a meaning, without wanting to fall into the cliché. We grew up with this word which was a reality. And with us, “savage” is related to “space”. The two are inseparable.
There is also something savage in the spelling of Raymonde Godin’s works. The green remains, but the yellow will emerge. Then, finally, gray and more-than-gray will take over. The result is almost simplistic. It is like those drawings by Matisse or Picasso which, with a single continuous line, defined a face or the body of a woman. There is efficiency in the line; it goes to the essential, which is space. All the paradox of the works of Raymonde Godin and our fascination resides there: the effectiveness of the line defining a space. And what is a space? An indefinite extent that contains and surrounds all objects.
We would be blind not to draw parallels between Raymonde Godin’s desire to capture the spaces of her childhood and certain works by Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) and Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002). There is atavism in the work of these artists. Even if Raymonde Godin has lived in France since 1954, she did not set foot in Quebec again before the age of 52, it was often pointed out to her that the space of her paintings could not be painted by a European . After 69 years of continuous life in France and years at the Louvre copying the Old Masters, Raymonde Godin has always remained a North American artist.