ART LOVERS
Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle’s works, displayed together in new AGO exhibit, hint at the artists’ long and turbulent relationship,
Mitchell/Riopelle, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s sumptuous abstract painting twohander centred on the long coupling of its two main characters, is exactly the kind of exhibition that Joan and Jean-Paul, respectively, would have loathed.
Two giants of the form, they saw themselves in a transcendent quest for essence and purity, as was the high-Modern order of the day.
The saccharine sentimentality of life back on Earth — which they shared as a couple for more than 25 years — wouldn’t register as so much as a footnote in their own view of things. Why would anyone care about the dull rituals of domesticity, companionship and — heaven forbid — love, when you have the fabric of the universe itself torn open and gushing forth, right in front of you?
It adds up to make the exhibition — appropriately subtitled Nothing in Mod
eration — something of an act of heresy. Its curator, Michel Martin, who organized the show for the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in Quebec City, admits as much.
Such a show “would have been unthinkable while they were alive,” he writes in the catalogue, given that they were “reluctant to countenance” those bold enough to suggest their relationship had any bearing on their output. Another factor, “their tempestuous (to say the least) relationship,” Martin writes, helped keep comparisons to a minimum.
And yet, here we are. As Martin says, he wants to offer a fresh take on all that purity, muddied with the all too human. “These two sensitive and extremely powerful personalities could not have evolved without being affected by the singular context of their relationship as it developed over the years,” he writes, and the literalists in the crowd will no doubt take to the show’s handful of one-toone comparisons.
A pair of small-scale gouache-onpaper works near the entrance — Riopelle’s Gitksan, from 1959, next to Mitchell’s Untitled, from 1958 — share a palette and show him pushing hard to escape his rigid technique of carving into his surfaces to match her fluid, gestural spontaneity.
Nearby, Marlin, a giant Mitchell canvas from 1961, rears up, her dense fogs of colour spawning jagged tendrils in his trademark bleu, blanc et rouge. To crystallize, the AGO has placed a much more Mitchell-like canvas right beside it, a soft bundle of lavender, green and gold. If you needed more prodding that she was thinking deeply of him, at least in the moment that Marlin took shape, then there’s your clue.
Mitchell and Riopelle found their calling at roughly the same time, but in two different worlds: he in the late 1940s as a charter member of Montreal’s Automatistes, a band of revolution-minded painters for whom abstraction would be their weapon in the Quiet Revolution against the strict Catholicism that dominated every aspect of Quebecois life; she in the early ’50s as a close descendent of the Abstract Expressionists, who had made New York the centre of the postwar art world.
They crossed paths in Paris in 1954 at the studio of Saul Steinberg, he having moved there in 1948, she freshly arrived and still tethered to New York. Riopelle was basking in the afterglow of having represented Canada at the Venice Biennale the year before and his expanding international fame was quickly growing.
It might have given him the required chutzpah to turn up at her door a few days later, a bouquet of rolled canvases clutched in his hand as a gift.
It was the departure point: Mitchell, who had been trying Paris on for size, would start bouncing back and forth between France and New York to be with her new love. When she was gone, he was bereft. Writing to her in 1956, he confesses to adopting her materials and technique: “I’m happier because ultimately (my work) resemble(s) your painting, my love.”
The show spares us such sentimentality, for the most part, though it doesn’t shy away from the depth of their union, a fact at which both painters most likely would have cringed.
Each gallery unfolds as a new chapter in a long-running conversation in which the two were engaged for the bulk of their careers. You can see both their harmony and their dis- connect: him experimenting with her loose, lyrical style and sometimes gaudy use of colour (Riopelle’s Non, non, non, non, non . . ., from 1961, is a veritable rainbow, with a towering sketch of a bird embedded within); she reducing her palette, echoing his hunger for structure. One gobsmacking moment puts Riopelle’s towering St. Anthon, a huge canvas of jagged black, green and red shards infecting a field of white palette-knife-carved forms, next to Mitchell’s Untitled, a chilly dark knot of black, white and blue. Both were made in 1955, within a year of their fateful encounter, and coincidence seems a little too much to expect.
But as often as they hang together, they stand apart, in life as well as art. As their relationship slowly unravels, you might be able to see a call-andresponse: Mitchell’s 1975 “Canada” series, dominated by a towering, muddy triptych of blues, browns and blacks, includes one small, sad piece fatefully titled Returned. Since the early ’70s, Riopelle had been spending more and more time in Quebec, their union slowly dwindling toward its end.
Back home, Riopelle embraced his homeland anew, communing with nature. The proclaimed narrative aside, this chapter serves as a good excuse to shake up the narrow view of Riopelle on this side of the Quebec border as a one-trick palette-knife virtuoso. Back home, he painted his colossal black-and-white Iceberg paintings, rarely seen here. One towering work, The Water Line, from 1977, is a thick surface of heavy black and white writhing with craggy forms — spindly foliage below, maybe; icy masses above.
Where he appears energized by his homecoming — like Micmac, a tow- ering diptych split into darkness and light named for the Indigenous people of New Brunswick, or the weirdly playful The Spirit of the String, after Inuit string games — Mitchell mourns their parting. Chasse Interdit, a monumental, mournful fourpart work from 1973, registers her protest in soft gauzy bricks of lavender, ochre, and turquoise, counterweighted with jagged mounds of blue and white, and compact fields of black. She didn’t like his hunting, because hunting meant Canada and Canada meant he was gone.
For those who favour happy endings, it’s easy enough to find. By the time of their deaths, Mitchell in 1993 and Riopelle in 2002, each had achieved full-blooded icon status and, unequivocally, individual styles powerfully distinct not only from each other but every one of their peers.
What more could a high-Modern abstract painter, locked in battle with the ineffable, hope for? Not much, I suppose. But if you wondered if there was space in the high-Modern heart for love, loss and regret, then I think this show has your answer.
Mitchell/Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation opens Feb. 18 at the Art Gallery of Ontario and continues to May 6. See ago.ca for information.