In Le domaine, one finds the habitual confrontation of a landscape and a figure in Jean Paul Lemieux’s paintings. Often the figure stands in the middle in the foreground. Here, on the contrary, the figure of a woman is positioned on the right, as if to show us more clearly the “domain” with which this person could have a special relation. The landscape itself is circumscribed by a row of bushes or trees in the background, under a grey sky. Painted in 1960, and with such a title, it is tempting to propose that there is a political content in the painting. A “domaine” is a property, and in this early period of the Quiet Revolution, the political slogan in Quebec was “Maître, chez nous!” (Master of our own domain!). However, there are two main reasons to resist such an interpretation. First, Lemieux’s political opinions are known—he was not a “separatist.” In fact, he made an explicit declaration against the separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada. After all, the word “domaine” is not so far from the word “dominion,” and Canada used to be a Dominion!
The other reason is quite simple. One look at the painting itself will convince any onlooker without prejudices that Lemieux goes far beyond politics. The presence of a human figure is crucial here. It is the woman that transforms what could appear as a mere tract of land delimited by a line of forest into a “domain.” In philosophical terms, one could say that it is her presence which unveils the meaning of this small region of the world, reveals its truth. Without her, indeed, this piece of land could easily return to a nondescript mystery as an ill-defined prairie under a grey sky.
Lemieux always groped for a more universal meaning to his painting. He was touched when his work was well received in the USSR when shown at the Museum of Leningrad, August 1 to 21, 1974, and at the National Gallery in Prague, September 13 to October 5, 1974; and that it was seen in a larger context, not only in relation to Quebec.
The relationship of the landscape to the figure is one of the prevailing themes of Lemieux’s work. In Le domaine, this relationship is not one of a worker on the land, nor of quiet contemplation of the land, since the woman’s back is turned to it. Her presence there is to reveal the true meaning of the landscape she is in, which is not just a landscape, but her domain. In other words, the figure in Lemieux’s painting confronts us like the “admonitor” in a classic religious painting of the seventeenth century. The “admonitor” was a character who, facing the spectator, pointed his finger towards the scene depicted in the centre of the canvas. He was positioned to the side, and his function was to establish a relationship between the spectator and the main topic of the painting, although he was not himself a part of the action.
The fact that in Le domaine the human figure is also seen in a half view, almost belonging to the space where we stand to look at the painting, creates a stronger proximity between us and the “domain” depicted here. In an Old Master painting, the “admonitor” was habitually seen in full, but since the invention of photography we have learned of the efficiency of a cropped figure in a composition. In La femme aux chrysanthèmes (1865), which is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Edgar Degas similarly positioned the presumed portrait of Mrs. Paul Valpinçon on the right side of the painting. Her “domain” was reduced to a bouquet of flowers, but her presence gave it meaning.
The above essay was written by the late François-Marc Gagnon of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, in 2007.