Director’s Choice: Salute to Riopelle

As the Canadian art world gears up to celebrate the opening of the Espace Riopelle – Pavillon Michael Audain at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in Quebec City later this month, we at the McMichael are taking stock of our choice holdings of works by this extraordinary artist. These include a number of mixed-media works on paper as well as paintings large and small that tell the story of Riopelle’s radical defiance in the face of social conformity and religious repression. The paintings, prints and sculptures of Riopelle, and of his Automatiste colleagues, announced the Quiet Revolution in Quebec society during the 1960s and ’70s; no other artistic movement in Canadian history has so coupled artistic and social transformation. 

It is perhaps this fact that accounts for the exceptional force of these works. Each canvas is packed with a kind of emotional dynamite that strains for release, dazzling with their layers upon layers of painterly gesture—drips, slabs, wedges—bound together into a compressed whole. Compacted, too, are the references to the Quebec landscape—the trees and bracken, sky, mud, rock and ice of the seasons. The result is a body of work replete with the liberating experience of landscape, but reverberating also with the pent-up promise of seismic social change. We treasure these paintings for the quest for freedom that they embody, and for their singular role in the history of Canadian art, and of Canada itself. Congratulations to MNBAQ for realizing their long-held dream to honour Riopelle’s legacy, and to the donors who made it possible.