FIRE & LIGHT
CANADIAN ARTIST RITA LETENDRE UPSTAGES O’KEEFFE AT MAJOR EXHIBITION AT AGO
This month the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Tor onto, f eatures t wo excellent artists, the major American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and the major Canadian painter Rita Letendre.
When you see both shows on the same day, as I did, the Letendre show makes the more powerful impression and stays with you longer. It’s not notably adventurous, and it doesn’t have the international charisma and glamour attached to O’Keeffe. But certainly it’s more organized, more unified, as if to make an important point.
This rich, glowing collection of large- scale Letendre abstractions, chosen with great care by two curators, Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik, demonstrates that Letendre has all along been heading in one direction. Each painting seems to describe a stage in her development of a colour palette that reflects how her imagination operates while interacting with nature. Since the 1950s, she’s variously pursued this goal with paintbrush, palette knife, her own hands and even an airbrush.
An abstract painting that refers to a sunset, for instance, has all the wonderful mingling colours you expect, laid on the surface with subtle intelligence. But it’s a sunset that could exist only in a masterful Letendre painting. The exhibition has a lovely title: Rita Letendre: Fire & Light.
Letendre was born in 1928 in Drummondville, Que., the first of seven children. Her heritage was Quebecois and, on her father’s side, Abenaki, a tribe of Indigenous people belonging to the Algonquins. Her family was poor and her schooling scant, but when she was working as a 19-year-old waitress in Montreal she was noticed by a knowledgeable customer who saw some drawings she had been making. He insisted she should study at the École des Beaux- Arts ( of which she had never heard) and even accompanied her when she went to register.
This was the beginning of her lifelong education in art. She worked as a figurative artist in the beginning but (since this was Montreal) she almost inevitably found her way to abstraction.
In the 1940s, the only artists in Canada who showed the influence of current international painting were Montrealers. Paul- Emile Borduas was the leader of the movement — they called themselves the Automatistes, named after a Borduas painting. Marginal but rebellious, they set themselves against both Quebec art and Quebec society. Some say that Quebec’s Quiet Revolu- tion did not begin with the victory of the provincial Liberals in 1960 but 14 years earlier, in 1946, when the Automatistes exhibited for the first time.
Quebec in that era was seam- lessly Roman Catholic, tightly run by the church in collaboration with the right- wing provincial government. The Automatistes were largely anti- clerical. They expected their spiritual life to develop independently, through their art, reflecting their feelings rather than dogma.
For a while they dreamed of discovering a way to unite several of the arts. They staged ballet performances in which choreographer, composer and set designer ( sometimes Jean- Paul Riopelle) came from their socialcultural circle. For lack of a gallery, they showed paintings in store windows and even on fences.
Into this milieu came a newcomer, Letendre, eager to find her way by absorbing the new paths the Automatistes were charting. Letendre embraced the ideal of art made through mature contemplation. For a time she investigated Zen Buddhism and its effect on art. She learned to admire the American abstractionists and in particular Franz Kline.
At art school she met Ulysse Comtois, a painter and sculptor who became her partner for the next 15 years. Later, she married Kosso Eloul, the Russian- born, Israeli- raised sculptor whose work now defines the identity of many public spaces in Canada. Having first lived in California, they settled in Toronto in 1964 and lived together as a celebrated local couple until he died in 1995.
She lives now in a mid- town condo in Toronto that displays some of her elegant work in the lobby. She’s had armies of admirers in Toronto over the years and a multitude of shows at everywhere from the Gallery Moos to the Dorothy Cameron Gallery to the current Gallery Gevik in Yorkville. But she’s never till now had a full- fledged retrospective in her adopted city. Finally, at age 88, she’s been given one by the AGO, and a very good one.
LETENDRE EMBRACED THE IDEAL OF ART MADE THROUGH MATURE CONTEMPLATION.