The artist Jean Paul Riopelle is best known for his renowned mature abstract style. In this fascinating history, François-Marc Gagnon begins with the artist's first paintings and his early commitment to objectivity to explore Riopelle's involvement with the Automatiste movement and its lasting impact on his work. Gagnon traces Riopelle's early development from the traditional figurative style imparted by his first teacher, Henri Bisson, through a turn toward the subjective on seeing a travelling exhibition of Dutch art that included the works of Vincent van Gogh, to Automatiste experiments in an alley studio in Montreal where he painted with Marcel Barbeau and Jean-Paul Mousseau. As early as 1946, Riopelle was an Automatiste emissary in Paris, organizing the first group show there. In spite of the perception that Riopelle was ideologically disinterested, Gagnon shows that he was in fact instrumental to the publication of Refus global - which includes his art on its cover - and publicly defended the manifesto amid controversy in both artistic and intellectual circles in Quebec. Initially devoted to the Automatiste notion of painting without preconception, by 1949 Riopelle was breaking into a markedly individual style in which the idea of chance was central. Gagnon reads this approach through Riopelle's own work and testimony, placing it in careful conversation with writing by philosophers and theorists on the role of chance in creativity. Gagnon also makes use of formal analysis of Riopelle's style and technique as he abandoned the paintbrush to work exclusively with the spatula. The well-established narrative of Jackson Pollock's influence on Riopelle is tested - and found wanting - in the first extended examination of Riopelle's relationship to American painting and to Pollock in particular. Demonstrating the qualities of scholarship and writing that were the hallmark of Gagnon's long career, his last book is engaging and clear and stands out for its originality, integrity, and profound insight into the work and milieu of the artist that André Breton called "the peerless trapper."

Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement (Volume 30) (McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History)

Arts & Photography

Gagnon, François-Marc

History & Criticism

McGill-Queen's University Press

Jean Paul Riopelle est surtout connu pour les célèbres toiles abstraites de sa maturité artistique. Toutefois, François Marc Gagnon amorce cette histoire fascinante avec les premières peintures et l'adhésion précoce à l'objectivité, avant de sonder la participation de l'artiste à l'automatisme et l'incidence durable de ce mouvement sur son oeuvre. Gagnon retrace les premières étapes du cheminement de Riopelle depuis le style figuratif traditionnel enseigné par Henri Bisson, son premier professeur, jusqu'au virage subjectif inspiré par une exposition itinérante d'art hollandais et, en particulier, des toiles de Vincent Van Gogh, ainsi qu'aux expériences automatistes dans un atelier d'une ruelle de Montréal où le peintre travaille en compagnie de Marcel Barbeau et de Jean Paul Mousseau. Dès 1946, Riopelle est un émissaire de l'automatisme à Paris, où il organise la première exposition collective consacrée à ce style. L'auteur montre que malgré la perception d'un désintéressement idéologique, Riopelle a joué un rôle déterminant dans la publication du Refus global, manifeste dont il a dessiné la couverture et qu'il défendra publiquement, alors que la controverse agite les cercles artistiques et intellectuels du Québec. En 1949, après avoir embrassé la notion automatiste d'une peinture sans préconception, Riopelle adopte un style très personnel, où le hasard tient une place prépondérante. L'auteur retrouve cette démarche dans l'oeuvre et les témoignages du peintre lui-même, qu'il fait dialoguer habilement avec les textes de philosophes et de théoriciens sur le rôle du hasard dans la créativité. Il propose en outre une analyse formelle du style et de la technique privilégiés par son sujet au moment où il abandonne définitivement le pinceau pour la spatule. Dans ce premier examen approfondi du rapport de Riopelle à la peinture américaine et à Jackson Pollock en particulier, il remet en question l'idée, pourtant largement acceptée, d'une influence de Pollock, qu'il juge peu probante. Cet ouvrage d'érudition, stimulant et clair, dernier de la longue carrière de l'auteur, est porté comme toujours par une écriture brillante. Il se distingue par son originalité, son intégrité et une connaissance approfondie de l'oeuvre et du milieu de l'artiste, ce « trappeur supérieur » selon le mot d'André Breton.

Jean Paul Riopelle et le Mouvement Automatiste (Volume 30) (McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History)

Part art, part science, part anthropology, this ambitious project presents an early Canadian perspective on natural history that is as much artistic and fantastical as it is encyclopedic. Edited and introduced by François-Marc Gagnon, The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas showcases an intriguing attempt to document the life of the new world - flora, fauna, and aboriginal. The book brings together for the first time the illustrated Codex Canadensis and The Natural History of the New World, following Gagnon's argument that both can be attributed to Louis Nicolas, a French Jesuit priest who travelled throughout Canada between 1664 and 1675. Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales, originally written in classical French, has been put in modern French by Réal Ouellet and translated into English by Nancy Senior. The Natural History presents a pre-Linnaean botany and pre-Darwinian account of living things, including hundreds of species of plants and vivid descriptions of wildlife. It is thoroughly annotated, focusing on the contemporary identification of species, as the result of a pan-Canadian collaboration of experts in fields from linguistics to biology and botany. The Codex Canadensis, currently in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is reproduced in full and provides both a fascinating visual account of wildlife as Nicolas saw it and a rare example of early Canadian art. Gagnon's introduction profiles Louis Nicolas and analyses connections between his work and European examples of natural illustration from the period. The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas shows how the wildlife and native inhabitants of the new world were understood and documented by a seventeenth-century European and makes available fundamental documents in the history and visual culture of early North America.

The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales (Volume 5) ... Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History)

Nicolas, Louis

Senior, Nancy

Ouellet, Réal

From his beginnings as a rural church decorator, to his role as catalyst of the social and artistic manifesto the Refus global, to a career as Canada's pre-eminent practitioner of radical abstraction abroad, Paul-Émile Borduas's short life encompassed the reversals and contradictions of the modern condition. Drawing on a lifetime of published research, François-Marc Gagnon's comprehensive biography is a far-reaching exploration of a Quebec cultural figure renowned for both his art and his thought. Gagnon details each period of Borduas's dynamic career - his apprenticeship with Ozias Leduc, his teaching in Montreal and the role within the Automatiste group, his move to New York at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and then, against the current of the times, to Paris, where he created the iconic images of his "cosmic" period. Borduas's relentless search for an authentic art often put him at odds with his surroundings. As an avant-garde artist in a Montreal art world bound by tradition, his most important work had to be exhibited in makeshift venues; as a surrealist-influenced francophone in New York, he recognized the importance of the major figures of Abstract Expressionism but maintained an independent style and method. A full appreciation of Borduas's radical stance - an artistic and intellectual orientation that was always towards the universal - transforms a Canadian cultural landscape where the narrative of artistic modernism centres on figurative landscape art. An original and rigorously researched work, Paul-Émile Borduas: A Critical Biography provides an English-language readership with a much-needed understanding of a seminal modernist, an exemplary figure in Canadian art, and the origins of modern art in North America.

Paul-Émile Borduas: A Critical Biography (Volume 12) (McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History)

Humor & Entertainment

The 2017 painting Quebec by Adam Miller represents over four hundred years of Quebec history. Featuring recognizable Quebec and Canadian politicians, ordinary characters, and allegorical figures, this unusual work visualizes many of the debates surrounding the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation as well as the 375th anniversary Montreal's founding. Bringing together a collection of commentaries on the painting and its artist, this volume contemplates the Quebec and Canadian experience and the bonds that link art and history. Included within are a reproduction of the painting, assorted detail shots, a key to the figures represented, and preparatory drawings used for the final work. Furthermore, essays by art historians François-Marc Gagnon, Donald Kuspit, and Alexandre Turgeon reflect on the painting and its style, as well as on its representation of history in relation to questions of politics, art, and collective memory. The book also contains an interview with Adam Miller conducted by Clarence Epstein, which reveals the sources of inspiration for the piece and the artist's creative process. A preface by the patron who commissioned the painting, Salvatore Guerrera, rounds out the contributions. Adam Miller is a painter known for his polished neo-classical figurative style that dramatizes historical subject matter and themes of social justice. He lives in New York.

Quebec: A Painting by Adam Miller

Kuspit, Donald

Epstein, Clarence

Turgeon, Alexandre

Cornelius Krieghoff, born in Amsterdam in 1815 and an immigrant to North America about 1835, is Canada's most famous nineteenth-century artist. The familiarity of his paintings may make it surprising that this book is published on the occasion of the very first retrospective exhibition of his work. We have known Krieghoff best for his affectionate depictions of everyday life among the habitants and First Nations residents of what is now Quebec. This project illuminates his considerable skill and narrative power as a painter, while revealing his relationship to his adopted country as it evolved from colony to nation. Kriegoff: Images of Canada features essays by three distinguished writers, and all 152 works from the exhibition are reproduced in colour. The nineteenth century in Europe and North America witnessed an artistic shift away from neoclassicism's monumental canvases of historical subjects to the intimacy, the dailiness, the humour and anecdotal warmth of genre painting. In Canada, as elsewhere, this shift occurred as a middle class, agent of growing commerce and industry, was rising to prominence. Situating the artist within the rich context of the period, Dennis Reid's essay focuses on Krieghoff as a major Canadian cultural figure in the years leading up to Confederation, showing his work to be as much shaped by his new homeland as his images indelibly shaped future public perception of his time and place. Ramsay Cook's essay presents a fresh reading of these iconic images in light of the underlying social attitudes and political issues of the day, especially as seen by a newcomer. Francois-Marc Gagnon's text examines the sources in European tradition of Krieghoff's images of French Canadians and Native peoples and considers the interpretation of his paintings by the influential Quebec art historian Gerard Morisset. Raymond Vezina contributes a useful, illustrated chronology, and Arlene Gehmacher provides detailed and fully researched catalogue entries. This book was published in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Master Mariner : Captain James Cook and the Peoples of the Pacific

Cook, Ramsay

Art Gallery Of Ontario

Reid, Dennis R.

Kriegh

Douglas&McIntyre

Krieghoff: Images of Canada

Painting

Douglas & McIntyre/Art Gallery of Ontario

Paul Emile Borduas

Individual Artists

Northeastern Univ Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gagnon, François-Marc. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gagnon, François-Marc