Nearly 25 years after the death of one of Canada’s most celebrated modern artists, a brand-new pavilion at Quebec’s Musée National des Beaux-Arts is opening this week in his honor. The Espace Riopelle-Michael Audain Pavilion is named for the acclaimed Quebecois painter and sculptor Jean Paul Riopelle and Michael Audain, a philanthropist and co-founder of the Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation. Born in Montreal in 1923, Riopelle earned international recognition in the 20th century as an influential abstract expressionist.
Riopelle’s unique “mosaic” style works, which he made by squeezing oil paint straight from the tube, then spreading it using a palette knife, gained particular renown. Riopelle was a key member of the Automatistes, a radical artistic movement founded in Quebec in the 1940s that was influenced by French surrealists and automatism, a philosophy of creating art without conscious thought. In 1948, the group published a controversial manifesto called Le Refus Global, or Total Refusal, which sought to shatter apart stodgy Quebecois culture with exhortations like: “Make way for magic!
Make way for objective enigmas! Make way for what is needed!” Riopelle’s style was devoted to radical abstraction and spur-of-the-moment, unconscious creation—an ethos immortalized in his diverse array of art works, spanning his more than 50-year career. The $61-million gallery, built with architectural nods to the artist’s home studio, comprises three stories and nearly 54,000 square-feet.
It overlooks both the Plains of Abraham and the St. With more than 130 of his works on display, the museum is officially home to the largest public Riopelle collection in the world. The primary show, “Riopelle: The Expression of Gesture,” is a permanent retrospective of Riopelle’s career, divided into seven themes on his constant artistic evolution.
These include early works from his Automatiste era, 1950s mosaic works, depictions of bestiaries, prints of Quebec’s natural landscape and murals he created later in his life. In “Art and Emotions” visitors will be able to share the feelings evoked by Riopelle’s works in real-time in an effort to help the museum “design new artificial intelligence-based tools to personalize exhibition pathways,” according to the exhibition’s online description. Finally, the gallery will have a specially designed space for Riopelle’s largest work, a 130-foot-long work composed of 30 paintings.
Entitled Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, he created the wall-spanning masterpiece over a period of three months in 1992 following the death of Joan Mitchell, Riopelle’s partner of roughly 20 years. Joan Mitchell was also a competitive figure skater who was named “Figure Skating Queen of the Midwest” in 1942. He painted his Rosa fresco using stencils and spray paint, the tools of graffiti artists.
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