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LOT 013

CC QMG RCA
1904 - 1990
Canadian

Portrait de garçon en rouge
oil on canvas
signed and on verso titled, dated 1964 and titled on the Galerie Agnès Lefort label and stamped with the Galerie Agnès Lefort stamp
25 3/4 x 19 1/2 in, 65.4 x 49.5 cm

Estimate: $150,000 - $250,000 CAD

Sold for: $193,250

Preview at: Heffel Toronto – 13 Hazelton Ave

PROVENANCE
Galerie Agnès Lefort, Montreal
Acquired from the above by Honourable Justice George Miller Hyde
By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario


In a posthumous tribute to his old friend Jean Paul Lemieux, artist Francesco Iacurto mused about the time he first saw the painter’s palette: “He never cleaned his palette. All the colours just accumulated over so many years, it was this thick!”[1] The two men first met in 1926 as new students at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. Their paths would soon cross again back in Quebec City, where they went on to form a lasting friendship. How much red might we have seen in those layers of colour that had built up over time on the painter’s palette?

From Lemieux’s first landscapes painted in Charlevoix in the early 1930s to his last major expressionist pieces in the 1980s, the colour red is an abundant and frequent presence in his body of work. But it may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of his paintings and the subdued shades he was known for. In Lemieux’s paintings, there is a subtlety to the fine brush-strokes that smooth the paint across the canvas in an exploration of the effects of transparency and light. His palette was limited to just a few pigments—olive green, black, ochre tinged with white, earth tones and reds—shades associated with the colours of dawn, dusk and blowing snow. Lemieux liked to say that he was more of a “valorist” than a “colourist,” meaning he was more interested in the degree of luminosity than in pure colour itself.[2]

While red had been part of his compositions from the beginning, it was not until the second half of the 1950s that Lemieux began calling attention to it in the titles of his paintings: Le tapis rouge (1957), Le chandail rouge (1958), Le manteau rouge (1960), Le jockey rouge (1961), La cravate rouge (1965), Le camion rouge (circa 1989), etc. He reminds us of the dominant role colour plays in the composition of a painting, defining form and space. Unlike his fellow Plasticien painters who found popularity at the turn of the 1960s for their abstract approach, Lemieux never deviated from figurative representation. But that did not stop him from exploring the wide range of values associated with the colour red, in his multiple expressive portraits as well as in urban landscapes bereft of life, such as La nuit à Québec-Ouest (1964) or The Aftermath/La ville détruite (1968).

Portrait de garçon en rouge is a shining example of Lemieux’s explorations in red. His intention is clear from the title (Portrait of a Boy in Red), which refers to the entire painting and not simply the colour of a garment or an object in the composition. Although Portrait de garçon en rouge was only shown publicly at Galerie Agnès Lefort, I am not sure when it was acquired more than half a century ago. There is something familiar about it, perhaps because it shares many characteristics with another, well-known painting, Le chandail rouge, from 1958 (Hart House Permanent Collection, University of Toronto). This earlier painting, larger in scale, is a full-length portrait of a young man on a red background, wearing black pants, a turtleneck sweater and a red cap.[3] When he revisited this subject in 1964, Lemieux took a new minimalist approach, presenting a closer view that eliminated the black mass of the pants and the top of the cap. All that remained was the boy’s luminous face, set atop a cylindrical neck and bordered by a fringe of dark hair, to compete with the values of red that had taken over the surface.

We thank Michèle Grandbois, author of Jean Paul Lemieux au Musée du Québec, for contributing the above essay, translated from the French. This work will be included in Grandbois's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.

1. Francesco Iacurto, “J’ai bordé mon compagnon,” in Marie Carani, Jean Paul Lemieux (Quebec City: Musée du Québec & Les Publications du Québec, 1992), exhibition catalogue, xx.

2. Quoted by Paul Dumas in “Rencontre avec Jean Paul Lemieux,” L’Information médicale et paramédicale (Montreal), June 17, 1969, 40–41.

3. For a reproduction of Le chandail rouge, see Carani, Jean Paul Lemieux, cat. no. 114, ill. p. 256.


Estimate: $150,000 - $250,000 CAD

All prices are in Canadian Dollars


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