PROVENANCE
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Laing Galleries, Toronto
The Collection of Torben V. Kristiansen, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Yseult Riopelle, Jean Paul Riopelle Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 3, 1960 – 1965, 2009, reproduced page 76, catalogue #1960.005H.1960
Guy Robert, Riopelle, Chasseur d’image, 1981, reproduced page 98

EXHIBITED
Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Variations: 50 Years of Canadian Art, March 18 – June 4, 2006
Masters Gallery Ltd., Vancouver, Jean Paul Riopelle Exhibition and Sale, April 23 – May 7, 2016
Galerie Eric Klinkhoff, Montreal, Collectors’ Treasures: Annual Loan Exhibition, October 19 – November 2, 2019, catalogue #44

Jean Paul Riopelle’s Nuit laiteuse is an evocative expression of a night landscape that highlights the tension between abstraction and figuration at the heart of his practice in the early 1960s. Nuit laiteuse, or Milky Night, initially presents as a masterful work of abstraction, with broad, gestural swathes of impasto applied with the palette knife forming interlocking structures of stark black and white. A vivid white architecture dominates the composition, its vertical and horizontal axes colliding at dead centre of the canvas. While white traditionally suggests absence or empty space, here it takes on weight and density through the thick application of paint, becoming three-dimensional and playing with the viewer’s perception of spatial depth.

Riopelle experimented with white throughout the late 1950s, using it to structure, to draw and to define space. In the words of art historian Pierre Schneider: “Black and white: these pre-eminent tools of drawing, he employs as a painter. When he works the surface with a knife, as is his habit, their shades are infinite, their potential is boundless…”[1] In Nuit laiteuse, Riopelle deploys diagonal shards of greyscale to break up the composition, like fractured rays of light. These create movement and give the painting a vital, kinetic quality, propelling the eye around the canvas in multiple directions.

At the same time, as its title suggests, Nuit laiteuse vividly evokes the sensation of entering a moonlit northern landscape in winter: its starkness and chill, the oppressive density of the forest, the open expanses of snow illuminated by the moon and stars. White and black become shades of snow, ice and the night sky. Flashes of colour—saturated greens and earth tones—echo throughout the work like glimpses of towering firs and cedars or the richness of the forest floor. Scattered jewel-toned highlights punctuate the otherwise restrained palette with glints of sapphire and amethyst, while along the upper-left edge of the canvas, hemmed in by the encroaching darkness, shimmering striations of pastel colours appear, like a fading sunset or an aurora borealis.

The result is not a physical representation of the forest by night but rather a fleeting impression or a feeling. Jean-Louis Prat, director of the Fondation Maeght, recalls Riopelle’s “remote but penetrating gaze, quick to capture an instant out of a mass of movement where nothing seemed distinguishable. An amazing show put on by nature at nightfall, in a boundless space where the painter appeared to register the smallest fluttering.”[2]

By 1960, Riopelle had already reached the pinnacle of success with his mosaic paintings. However, never one to repeat himself with formulaic approaches, he continued to innovate, setting himself new visual challenges and experimenting with painterly techniques. Nuit laiteuse is illustrative of Riopelle’s evolution during this period: the kaleidoscopic palette of the mosaic paintings has been stripped back, allowing the artist to explore the possibilities of black and white. Likewise, the dense webs of tesserae that were the hallmark of the 1950s have opened out, creating space. Now, thick paint is scraped across the canvas with virtuoso strokes of the palette knife in an elemental display of life force. The resulting ridges and textures of the impasto in Nuit laiteuse create a sculptural topography in conversation with the winter scene of its subject.

Nuit laiteuse was originally sold by the venerable Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, a distinguished provenance that enhances the work’s desirability. The youngest son of the great modernist painter Henri Matisse, Pierre Matisse made his name by introducing the work of European modern and post-war artists to the wealthy American elite for over six decades. Matisse was an indefatigable champion and supporter of Riopelle’s work in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death in 1989.

1. Quoted in Jean Paul Riopelle and Denise L. Bissonnette, Jean Paul Riopelle (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1991), exhibition catalogue, 141.

2. Ibid., 11.

For the biography on Torben V. Kristiansen in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars