Jean Paul Riopelle would have been 99 years old on October 7, 2022. He was a child of autumn. And autumn with its colors, when the white geese, which he loved so much, take flight in droves towards the south, was one of his favorite seasons.
Jean Paul Riopelle would have been 99 years old on October 7, 2022. He was a child of autumn. And autumn with its colors, when the white geese, which he loved so much, take flight in droves towards the south, was one of his favorite seasons.
“Fall was a time when he worked a lot,” said the artist’s spouse, Huguette Vachon, in an interview at the launch of the festivities surrounding the artist’s centenary. We were moving to Île-aux-Oies, in the workshops. He was doing big productions. He was very stimulated. »
It is also on L’Isle-aux-Grues, off Montmagny, that Huguette Vachon intends to open a museum-workshop and an interpretation center over the next few years.
The place should be used as much for the interpretation of the birds of the island as for the exhibition of works by Riopelle. “We are going to have small classes on Saturdays,” she said, adding that she would also like to invite schools to visit the site during goose season. The works of the master will be exhibited there, notably drawn from the private collection of Mrs.me Vachon. Similarly, the Montmagny library also intends to receive loans from collectors of the painter’s works and hold activities on this theme throughout the year.
“He loved nature so much that protection, for him, was automatic. It was necessary to protect the beautiful territories, the fauna, the flora. He picked mushrooms and he knew all the plants we could eat,” recalls Huguette Vachon.
Jean Paul Riopelle for everyone
The site of the future museum, whose land has already been purchased, notably offers a view of Baie-Saint-Paul, on the other side of the river. The architect Pierre Thibault has already been chosen to build the museum-workshop, but the Riopelle-Vachon Foundation says it still has to raise the funds, four million dollars, to follow up on the project.
For its part, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec (MNBAQ), which will house a new wing to the glory of the painter, recently announced that it is the Quebec firm fabg that will build the building intended to receive “the most largest collection of works by Riopelle in the world”. The plan provides that Espace Riopelle, which should be finished in 2026, successively evokes the artist’s studio, with its wooden ceilings, the Nordicity and the landscapes of L’Isle-aux-Grues.
Éric Gauthier, principal associate architect of fabg, said he wanted to evoke, with the MNBAQ pavilion, the central elements of Riopelle’s life and work, “the love of nature, dynamism, movement”.
This monument is part of the range of projects that mark Riopelle’s centenary, with the piece in his honor created by Robert Lepage, which will be shown at Duceppe, or the Cirque des 7 Doigts show which will pay homage to him at the summer 2023.
But Jean Paul Riopelle’s big dream was to create a center for artists, where the greatest would rub shoulders with the young, recalls Huguette Vachon.
“When he was alive, what he would have liked the most was for all his artist friends and him to have a great place to exchange”, says Mme Vachon. In 1980, there was talk of such a center being built in the current Charles-Baillairgé pavilion, of the MNBAQ, on the site of the former Quebec prison.
If the work of Jean Paul Riopelle is “increasingly known throughout the world”, says his companion, it has nevertheless developed in distinct phases, in Europe and in Quebec. “The biggest part of his career, he did it in France,” she said. It was a time when he was less well known on this side of the Atlantic.
Last year, a painting by Jean Paul Riopelle, the darker, painted in 1954, sold for $5.4 million at Christie’s in Paris. This painting had never been offered for sale before. It was, said the Christie’s presentation sheet, “exceptional both in scope and ambition.” The year 1954 was also considered a key moment in the life of the artist, since it was the time of his first personal exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, in New York.
About Rosa Luxemburg
Then, when the painter returned to Quebec in the 1990s, it was the turn of European collectors to lose track of him. “However, it is a very important period in the work of Riopelle, underlines Mr.me Vachon. The one, in particular, which gave birth to Tribute to Rosa Luxemburgexhibited at the MNBAQ, a masterpiece by the artist.
It is moreover on the theme of this Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg that Robert Lepage designed the play that will celebrate Riopelle’s work, the playwright has already announced. It is the actor Luc Picard who will take on the role of Jean Paul Riopelle on stage, and Anne-Marie Cadieux who will play that of Joan Mitchell, the late spouse of the artist. Other actors will embody the many artists who gravitated around Jean Paul Riopelle, from André Breton to Samuel Beckett via Alberto Giacometti.
For Huguette Vachon, the centenary could give everyone the opportunity to get to know Jean Paul Riopelle, beyond art circles. Make it “a kind of Maurice Richard”, she says.