Artist’s hard-won confidence on colourful display at AGO
Rita Letendre, who’s 89, overcame prejudice and self-doubt to become a national treasure
In 1970, when Rita Letendre was 42, she posed for a photo with Lodestar, a towering painting she’d made that year.
It was a sharp missile of black and white slashing diagonally across a canvas of blue, slicing it along a diagonal as though at supersonic speed. It matched its maker nicely as she stood triumphantly alongside it, supremely confident in black leather bell bottoms.
“Oh, I always wore those,” Letendre laughs, bringing the image close enough for her one good eye to see. “Oh my god. Oh my god,” she sighed. “I’m getting to be quite an old lady now.”
At 89, Letendre’s sight is all but gone. Two years ago, she had to give up painting because of it, perhaps the only defeat of her remarkable career. The Art Gallery of Ontario just opened Fire & Light, a survey of almost 70 years of her work, and it unlocks both the oeuvre of one of the country’s great painters and a flood of memories for the artist herself.
“They chose some of my very best work,” Letendre says, brightening. “I was able to go before the opening and see each painting close up, so I could really see. What I saw was my life up there and it was wonderful. For me, life is not a small thing. I want it to be big and strong.”
It’s a credo Letendre has taken to heart from the very beginning. Approaching 90, Letendre is vivacious and cheery, her only down moments coming as she considers her life’s work taken from her by an accident of genetics.
“My mother had the same thing,” she says, of the macular degeneration that has robbed her ability to see. “Nothing was more wonderful than painting all day, trying to understand the beauty of life.”
When I suggest that she might be able to still make small drawings, close up, with what remains of her sight, she just shakes her head. “To make small failures? Non,” she says. “I like to win.”
The eldest of seven children born in poverty in Drummondville, Que., Letendre’s unassailable optimism has been a guiding force in her life and career. It blossomed against the odds from the very beginning. Her father, who was First Nations Abenaki, struggled to support his family, and when Rita’s hand was badly injured at age 3 she was sent to live with her grandmother in a small town near Odanak, an Abenaki reserve close to Trois-Rivières.
By the time she reached school age, she had reunited with her family in Saint-Majorique-de- Grantham, near Drummondville, where she and her siblings endured daily racist taunts from other students because of their Indigenous heritage. At times, it turned to violence; Letendre, as an escape, created vast worlds of drawings in her schoolbooks, retreating into her imagination.
It would colour her experience of the world, even as a successful painter decades later. Letendre didn’t reject her heritage, but as Indigenous cultural activism blossomed in the early 1970s with such movements as the Professional Native Artists Inc., a group of Indigenous artists including Daphne Odjg and Norval Morrisseau that demanded Canadian museums consider their work on their own terms, Letendre kept her background mostly to herself.
“I think she’s aware of how reductive society can be when you put a label on things,” said Wanda Nanibush, the AGO’s curator of Canadian and Indigenous art. “With Rita, it’s her personality: She’s so confident. ‘I’m Rita,’ is what she says. She wants to be seen as a whole person.”
For Letendre, confidence had to be learned. “When I was 10, 11, I was picking wild strawberries with my mother, when a storm began,” she recalls. “My mother took me inside to see my grandmother. I was very afraid, of the thunder, the lightning, and my grandmother spoke to me instead of its beauty and the strength of the storm. She showed me what was beautiful about it, that difficulty had its own beauty, and you could fight it and win.”
When Letendre was 13, her family moved to Montreal, her father hoping to secure better work and bring the family out of poverty. Working as a cashier in a Montreal diner, she would ring customers up and draw on paper scraps between bills. One day, in 1948, one of the regulars noticed her drawings and suggested she apply to the art school at the Musée des beaux-arts.
Letendre, then19, demurred, intimidated at the thought — she had no formal training, and university was an impossibility for a young Indigenous woman mired in poverty — so he took her there himself.
“I was so scared. I hoped he would look away for a moment and I would escape,” she laughed. He didn’t, and Letendre was given a pencil and paper at the registrar’s office and asked to draw a bus. “I did the best I could and they accepted me,” she said.
Here, her own fight would begin. She started adjusting her hours at the restaurant, going to school during the day, working in the evenings and painting at night. Sleep was in short supply, “but I was strong, I could manage it and there was nothing I wanted to do more,” she said.
Just as she was beginning at the school, a rebellious group of Montreal abstract painters lead by Paul-Émile Borduas, Les Automatistes, had issued a challenge to straitlaced Catholic, French-Canadian society. In 1948, they published a manifesto, Le Refus Global, a demand for artistic and social freedom, and it was scandalous. Borduas became an outcast from polite artistic society in Montreal; no longer able to teach at schools like the Beaux-arts, he decamped for New York where he and other Automatistes such as Jean-Paul Riopelle and Fernand Leduc would build global reputations. Letendre, meanwhile, chafed quickly at the school’s conservatism. “To make a painting showing a little house on a street, that doesn’t show life,” she said. “I wanted to show the joy of life, its difficulties, its power.”
She had left the school by 1949 and, by the early 1950s, Letendre was showing small abstract works.
In 1954, a former classmate, Ulysse Comtois, had heard that Borduas would be back in Montreal, looking for young painters for an Automatiste show — to continue the lineage, perhaps, of his revolution.
Letendre, in her mid-20s, was selected as one of its heirs and her work was included in La matière chante in 1954. It would be the very last Automatiste exhibition of the era and, for Letendre, a beginning. “People said, ‘A woman? Painting?’ ” Letendre says, her face twisted in mock horror. “But guess what? Someone bought it! It might have been for $50, but the fact that someone wanted it gave me so much pep.”
Decades on, Letendre has become a national treasure, a towering, unique voice in the country’s painting landscape. At the AGO, her work shifts from early, rough gestural Automatiste styles to the crisp geometries and vibrant colours racing across her canvases of the 1970s. By the late ’80s, she’s painting in thick, robust strokes again, mounds of colour gnawing at surrounding shadows.
“I use black all the time,” she says, eyes close to an image of Echoes, from 1987, a fiery eruption in the darkness.
“But black is not a danger; the colour and light are fighting it and winning. You don’t accept darkness, you pass through it and you win.”
At the end of a long corridor, Lodestar towers above the concrete floor, a bolt of energy aimed at a faraway point. “That’s what we do with life: We take off,” Letendre says. “You don’t let yourself be defeated. There’s a joy in living. That’s what my painting is about.” Rita Letendre: Fire & Light continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario until Sept 17.