Jean Paul Riopelle

Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), Canadian painter and sculptor best known for his highly colored, mosaic-like abstract paintings. An original member of the 1940s Montréal art group Les Automatistes, Riopelle earned international acclaim.

Riopelle was born in Montréal, Québec. He took painting lessons from one of his elementary school teachers, who was an amateur painter. Riopelle learned to paint realistically but without much inspiration. In 1943 he enrolled at the École du Meuble (School of Furniture Design) and became a student of painter Paul-Émile Borduas. Borduas, an abstract artist, had a liberating influence on Riopelle’s art and thought. In 1945 Riopelle joined a group of surrealist abstract painters led by Borduas that would become known as Les Automatistes. This group of painters employed “automatic,” or spontaneous, painting to express the subconscious.

In 1946 Riopelle moved to Paris, France, although he still frequently traveled back to Canada and to the United States. In Paris he met other surrealist writers and artists, including André Breton, the poet who had inspired the Automatistes. Riopelle was the only Canadian to exhibit at the surrealists’ last group show in Paris in 1947. In 1948 he visited Montréal to sign the Automatistes’ manifesto, Refus Global (Global Refusal).

In Paris Riopelle began to apply the painting techniques of the Tachist (French tâche, “spot”) painters by emphasizing patches of color. By 1950 he painted by squeezing paint directly from the tube onto his canvases, building up mosaic-like patterns of brightly colored smears and drips. Riopelle was warmly received by the Parisian avant-garde. He was especially popular with those in the abstraction lyrique school, which advocated painting techniques that called attention to how the artist produced a painting. Riopelle associated with other young artists in Paris, including Georges Mathieu, Pierre Soulages, Za Wou Ki, and Maria Elena Vieira da Silva. Riopelle also became well acquainted with American painters then living in Paris, including Sam Francis. In 1953 Riopelle successfully debuted his work in the United States at a show in the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.

In 1953 Riopelle began using a palette knife to add another dimension to his works. Colorful canvases such as Pavane (1954, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario) brought Riopelle immense international success. After 1956 he included large white areas in his works. Riopelle finally departed from abstract painting after many years, shifting to figurative painting, as in his Owls series in the 1970s and the Snow Geese series in the 1980s. Riopelle began spending more time in Canada in the 1980s.