The painter Rita Letendre is no longer

The great Quebec painter Rita Letendre passed away last Saturday in Toronto, at the age of 93, after a long illness. Determined, dynamic artist, she had found her voice and an iconic signature. “She was one of the shooting stars of her time,” says her gallery owner Simon Blais.

Eric Clement
Press

“It was expected, but it’s still a shock,” said Simon Blais. We loved her so much, this luminous woman… She had a dog! ”

In recent years, Rita Letendre’s health had deteriorated. She was very weak and could only get around in a wheelchair. “For two and a half months, she had been in the hospital after suffering from pneumonia,” says her gallery owner. She had lost a lot so it was rather a relief, because he was no longer the person we liked to see. She was so energetic. She was jogging. She has always been in good shape. She was a good friend. We admired him a lot. ”

Born in 1928 in Drummondville, to a Quebecois father and a mother of Abenaki descent, Rita Letendre had studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal at the end of the 1940s. guardianship of Paul-Émile Borduas and with the Automatistes group that it will take off at the beginning of the 1950s ”, says its gallery owner.

Rita Letendre was a great lover of painting. Until she largely lost her sight due to macular degeneration, she painted every day in her studio in Toronto. His flamboyant, strong and personal works were fascinating with light and energy. There was happiness in his paintings. That in particular of thought. Because she has never stopped to reflect and to develop her art, with her questions on our finitude, on the mystery of man at the heart of infinity.

“I try to fracture for a moment in my paintings, to capture a flash of luminosity, but leaving the opening to infinity, as if there was nothing left of the painting at the end…, she said in 1969 to journalist Claude-Lise Gagnon in Life of the arts. Hold ! It is as if I were painting a comet which descended from the cosmos, which struck my eyes for a second, the time of an incandescence, of a fluorescence, then continued its route in the galaxies. ”

In front of his paintings, we were captivated. We wrote it again last week when BYDealers had just auctioned off four of his works: two from the 60s, and two of his famous beams from the 70s, Malapec and Dorit. “She is one of the stars of the sale,” Marc-Antoine Longpré, CEO of BYDealers, told us.

Rita Letendre will leave an indelible mark in the history of Quebec and Canadian art. Like Marcelle Ferron and Françoise Sullivan, according to Simon Blais. “One of those women who managed to win at a time when there were only for men,” he says. She had a determined character. She came from a very poor background, but she made her place as an artist. When asked if it had been difficult to have a career as a woman, she always replied that she was above all an artist, and especially Rita Letendre! ”

In the 1960s, she created beautiful compositions with heaps of paint, oblique traces and spectacular impasto. “It was very unique in Quebec,” says Simon Blais. His painting then became more minimalist before transforming with his beams, painted with oil and then with aerosol. It was around this time that museums and collectors began to consider her, which continued in subsequent years, with the painter notably exhibiting at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 1973.

After marrying the Israeli sculptor Kosso Elloul (1920-1995), she will form a very prominent couple with him in Toronto. It was at this time that she produced several murals on the facades of buildings in the Queen City. In 1978, she created the famous work Joy, on the ceiling of Glencairn underground station. A work on glass 55 m long painted with aerosol.

For Anne Grace, curator of modern art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Rita Letendre was an artist, an extraordinary person. “I first met her in Toronto several years ago,” she says. Coming from a very modest family, she told me about the joy she felt as a child when she was first given a large blank sheet of paper to draw on. His luminous works embody this feeling of wonder as well as his dynamism. During her career, she embarked on ambitious public art projects without hesitation. Considered worldwide as one of the most important engravers of her generation, she leaves us a vast legacy of paintings, produced from the time when she frequented the Automatists until recent years. ”

The MMFA has 13 paintings by Rita Letendre. The Museum has dedicated two exhibitions to him, one in 1961 and Colorful vibrations, in 1977, at the height of its beams.

In Ottawa, the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) also paid tribute to him. “Rita Letendre had a unique ability to render the energy of light, creating focal points of the forces around us, harnessed in paintings on a human or monumental scale,” says Greg A. Hill, senior curator of Indigenous art funds Audain, at the NGC. It is a huge loss for the visual arts in Canada. Her light has now become that cosmic energy that she has spent her life painting. ”

The Musée d’art de Joliette has collected a lot of Rita Letendre, of which it has 23 works. “We are preparing an exhibition about it for fall 2022,” says Julie Armstrong-Boileau, MAJ’s communications and marketing manager.

“It is with immense sadness that we learned today of the death of this grandiose artist Rita Letendre,” wrote Jean-Luc Murray, Director General of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. The aesthetic strength of her work, the innovative nature of her achievements, the continuous development of her career, as well as her exceptional contribution to the emancipation of female practices in visual art, make her an essential figure in our history of art. The awarding of the Governor General of Canada Award in 2010 and the Paul-Émile Borduas Award in 2016 – the most prestigious awards in the field of visual arts in the country – eloquently testifies to his invaluable contribution to history paint. ”

Jacques Letendre, only son of Rita Letendre, lived with her little – having been raised by his grandparents – but he is one of her biggest fans. “When I see the exhibition Invent freedom, with six women painters, including my mother, in Baie-Saint-Paul, I find that the most interesting paintings are those of Rita, because she has made her painting evolve throughout her career, he says. But I have a little bitterness about its recognition in Quebec. I don’t think we really appreciated it. ”

Rita Letendre will be buried with her partner in Toronto, in complete privacy, on Friday. The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), which organized a retrospective for him in 2017, will pay tribute to him next spring, according to Jacques Letendre. And the Simon Blais Gallery, among others, will continue to honor his genius.