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Lot Essay
‘I don’t take from Nature, I go towards Nature’ (Jean-Paul Riopelle)
Spanning almost two metres in width, La Forêt (The Forest) is a spectacular large-scale vision dating from the finest period of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s practice. Across its dazzling surface, the artist orchestrates a kaleidoscopic chromatic symphony, alive with myriad tones of green, red and yellow. Flashes of blue glint through the texture like glimpses of sky; webs of black and white create a dappled canopy of light and shade. Painted in 1953, and prominently exhibited over the following fifteen years, the work coincides with the beginnings of Riopelle’s international career, taking its place within a flurry of masterworks. That year, La nuit bleue (Blue Night) (1953, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)—a close cousin of La Forêt—featured in James Johnson Sweeney’s landmark exhibition Younger European Painters at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, launching his reputation in America. Both paintings demonstrate the impact of the natural world upon the artist’s psyche: though unmistakably abstract, La Forêt quivers with the same deliquescent beauty as sunlight rippling through trees, or leaves dancing in the breeze.
Riopelle grew up in Canada, and moved to Paris in 1947. He originally took his place within Surrealist circles, before becoming affiliated with the ‘Lyrical Abstraction’ movement embodied by artists such as Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Georges Mathieu and Zao Wou-Ki. His work, however, was never conceived in exclusively abstract terms. Rather, as the critic Pierre Schneider wrote in 1956, it was deeply connected to his upbringing in ‘a continent where everything is as immense as the sea: corn, snow and above all the forest’ (P. Schneider, L’œil, June 1956). The latter, indeed, gave rise to various works throughout his oeuvre, including the 1953 painting Blizzard sylvestre (Forest Blizzard) (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Riopelle, however, noted that he was less inspired by the vastness of the Canadian wilderness than by the beauty contained within its individual leaves. Much like Joan Mitchell—another Parisian émigré, with whom he began a relationship in 1959—he did not seek to represent nature in literal terms. Instead, he hoped to capture the sensations he experienced within it, sharing with Mitchell a deep regard for the work of Claude Monet.
Riopelle’s ascent to the international stage brought his work to life in new and thrilling ways. Following the success of his exhibition at Galerie Pierre Loeb in Paris in 1953, his work began to make waves in America: initially through Sweeney’s exhibition, where his work was widely considered the finest within a line-up that included Pierre Soulages, Alberto Burri and others. His debut solo exhibition in New York at Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1954 was similarly well-received, and that year he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. It was during this period that critics began to compare his work to that of Jackson Pollock. Though superficially similar, the two artists’ techniques were in fact born of different impulses: while both artists dripped paint onto canvas, Riopelle also used a palette knife to apply his pigment. The results, unlike Pollock’s dense, linear jungles, were angular thickets: prisms animated by the ebb and flow of different hues. ‘Pollock works with line … Riopelle works with colour’, wrote the critic James Fitzsimmons in 1954; ‘he composes forest fugues with wedges of colour’ (J. Fitzsimmons, ‘Art’, Arts and Architecture, New York, vol. LXXI, no. 1, January 1954, pp. 29-32).
For all his fascination with nature, Riopelle was also enamoured with the worlds of racing and fast cars. 1953, indeed, was the year that he bought his first vintage vehicle, and his passion for speed spilled into his paintings. La Forêt is powered by a sense of internal dynamism, beams of light ricocheting across its surface. Colours and textures collide head-on, skewing one another in new directions. The canvas thrums with energy, creating pockets of tension that seem to detonate towards the edges of the picture plane. In the catalogue introduction to his 1954 exhibition at Pierre Matisse, Georges Duthuit wrote ‘Like a trapper fresh from the Canadian solitudes measuring his stride to our narrow pavements, Jean-Paul Riopelle seems hardly to contain the flooding energies of youth at its full, its impetuosity and peremptoriness that bid defiance to distance and bulk’ (G. Duthuit, ‘A painter of awakening: Jean-Paul Riopelle’, trans. S. Beckett, in Riopelle: First American Exhibition, exh. cat. Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York 1954, n.p.). It is a statement borne out by La Forêt, which hurtles its way into an extraordinary new chapter of art.
Spanning almost two metres in width, La Forêt (The Forest) is a spectacular large-scale vision dating from the finest period of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s practice. Across its dazzling surface, the artist orchestrates a kaleidoscopic chromatic symphony, alive with myriad tones of green, red and yellow. Flashes of blue glint through the texture like glimpses of sky; webs of black and white create a dappled canopy of light and shade. Painted in 1953, and prominently exhibited over the following fifteen years, the work coincides with the beginnings of Riopelle’s international career, taking its place within a flurry of masterworks. That year, La nuit bleue (Blue Night) (1953, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)—a close cousin of La Forêt—featured in James Johnson Sweeney’s landmark exhibition Younger European Painters at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, launching his reputation in America. Both paintings demonstrate the impact of the natural world upon the artist’s psyche: though unmistakably abstract, La Forêt quivers with the same deliquescent beauty as sunlight rippling through trees, or leaves dancing in the breeze.
Riopelle grew up in Canada, and moved to Paris in 1947. He originally took his place within Surrealist circles, before becoming affiliated with the ‘Lyrical Abstraction’ movement embodied by artists such as Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Georges Mathieu and Zao Wou-Ki. His work, however, was never conceived in exclusively abstract terms. Rather, as the critic Pierre Schneider wrote in 1956, it was deeply connected to his upbringing in ‘a continent where everything is as immense as the sea: corn, snow and above all the forest’ (P. Schneider, L’œil, June 1956). The latter, indeed, gave rise to various works throughout his oeuvre, including the 1953 painting Blizzard sylvestre (Forest Blizzard) (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Riopelle, however, noted that he was less inspired by the vastness of the Canadian wilderness than by the beauty contained within its individual leaves. Much like Joan Mitchell—another Parisian émigré, with whom he began a relationship in 1959—he did not seek to represent nature in literal terms. Instead, he hoped to capture the sensations he experienced within it, sharing with Mitchell a deep regard for the work of Claude Monet.
Riopelle’s ascent to the international stage brought his work to life in new and thrilling ways. Following the success of his exhibition at Galerie Pierre Loeb in Paris in 1953, his work began to make waves in America: initially through Sweeney’s exhibition, where his work was widely considered the finest within a line-up that included Pierre Soulages, Alberto Burri and others. His debut solo exhibition in New York at Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1954 was similarly well-received, and that year he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. It was during this period that critics began to compare his work to that of Jackson Pollock. Though superficially similar, the two artists’ techniques were in fact born of different impulses: while both artists dripped paint onto canvas, Riopelle also used a palette knife to apply his pigment. The results, unlike Pollock’s dense, linear jungles, were angular thickets: prisms animated by the ebb and flow of different hues. ‘Pollock works with line … Riopelle works with colour’, wrote the critic James Fitzsimmons in 1954; ‘he composes forest fugues with wedges of colour’ (J. Fitzsimmons, ‘Art’, Arts and Architecture, New York, vol. LXXI, no. 1, January 1954, pp. 29-32).
For all his fascination with nature, Riopelle was also enamoured with the worlds of racing and fast cars. 1953, indeed, was the year that he bought his first vintage vehicle, and his passion for speed spilled into his paintings. La Forêt is powered by a sense of internal dynamism, beams of light ricocheting across its surface. Colours and textures collide head-on, skewing one another in new directions. The canvas thrums with energy, creating pockets of tension that seem to detonate towards the edges of the picture plane. In the catalogue introduction to his 1954 exhibition at Pierre Matisse, Georges Duthuit wrote ‘Like a trapper fresh from the Canadian solitudes measuring his stride to our narrow pavements, Jean-Paul Riopelle seems hardly to contain the flooding energies of youth at its full, its impetuosity and peremptoriness that bid defiance to distance and bulk’ (G. Duthuit, ‘A painter of awakening: Jean-Paul Riopelle’, trans. S. Beckett, in Riopelle: First American Exhibition, exh. cat. Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York 1954, n.p.). It is a statement borne out by La Forêt, which hurtles its way into an extraordinary new chapter of art.