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Riopelle in Russia

The Hermitage picks a winner

In Leningrad it is St. Petersburg that I admire. I know no more beautiful city; no more harmonious blending of stone, metal, and water. It might be a dream of Pushkin’s or of Baudelaire’s.

—André Gide, Return from the U.S.S.R.

WHAT GIDE WROTE about St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1937—albeit slightly disillusioned, as he was at that point, by the gathering insufficiencies of the Soviet system—is no less true today. “The mind,” he stated, revelling in the city’s cultural glories, “moves in it easily and happily.”

So it seemed, from the moment my partner, Malgorzata, my daughter, Julia, and I arrived there, after an endless flight from Toronto via Frankfurt, on a hot Wednesday evening last June. We were in St. Petersburg to see “Riopelle: Canadian Artist—Works from the Collection of Power Corporation of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,” now mounted at the State Hermitage Museum. We stepped off the plane, feeling both weary and pumped, and into the strange, hallucinatory luminosity of one of the city’s infamous white nights. Nobody sleeps through white nights. So we dropped all our stuff at the hotel and strolled through the pearly, perpetual twilight to take our first look at the Winter Palace and the Hermitage, where, in the morning, we’d find the MMFA’s big imported exhibition.

What is true of the city of St. Petersburg, that the mind moves in it easily and happily, is not quite so true of the great museum itself—that microcosmic city of art that Gide, with no little understatement, called “that prodigious picture-gallery.” His concerns being directed more towards Russia’s political condition, however, than its aesthetic offerings, Gide pretty much sidesteps the Hermitage entirely in his book, noting only that “nothing I could say about it would satisfy me.”

Save this: “And yet I should like in passing,” he writes, “to give a word of praise to the activity and intelligence which, whenever possible, have grouped round each picture everything by the same master that may help us to understand it—sketches, drawings and studies which explain the work’s slow formation.” Well, as the great Russia-born poet Joseph Brodsky, permanently exiled from his city and his country in 1972, once remarked, “You cannot enter the same river twice, even if it is the Neva River.” And this is surely true of the Hermitage as well, which, nobly situated on that venerable river’s banks (“How grey the mystic Neva lapping at its door!” I had scribbled in my journal), changes its mood and its meaning like quicksilver, despite the myriad masterworks fixed on the walls like beacons and the heaving, oceanic crowds flowing before them.

Obviously, our world is apocalyptically different from the world in which Gide wrote his book, and there are no longer helpful arrays of pedagogically enriching sketches and studies surrounding and amplifying the Hermitage’s proudest possessions. Indeed, it seemed to me that all the paintings and sculptures were pretty much on their own, curatorially speaking, and blithely offered up for breathy inspection by the tourist masses.

Certainly the babushka-like security guards assigned only to the rooms where the good stuff was (the crowd-pleasing Titians, Rembrandts, Rubens, van Dykes, etc.), plumped upon their scuffed baroque chairs and nodding over, like sheaves of wheat, into their veils of sleep, seemed more anecdotal than vigilant. Basically, the masses rule the Hermitage. I remember straining to see a jewel-like Leonardo, about as big as a tennis racquet, all the while bucking the press of visitors that, as I noted, “crowd sluggishly past it like a fat river, sweating scent and hairspray and industrial-strength deodorant.”

A day later (on June 16), at 13:00 hours, we all filed into the Hermitage Theatre (Catherine the Great’s theatre!) to be welcomed by Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the Hermitage, by Guy Cogeval, Director of the MMFA, and by Stéphane Aquin, curator of the Riopelle exhibition and the MMFA’s Curator of Contemporary Art.

Then, a half-hour later, we were all off to the museum’s Alexandra Hall for the opening of the Riopelle show proper. This was a curious experience for a couple of reasons. First, it was a little dismaying to find that the vaulted, robin’s egg–blue hall, with its meringue-white plasterwork and its shining, ormolu chandeliers, possessed so much architectural buoyancy that the Riopelles, affixed to a fleet of taupe, low-rise room dividers, seemed disconcertingly earthbound by comparison. It was all anticlimax before the ribbon got cut.

The second curious experience of this official opening was hearing Dr. Piotrovsky solemnly attesting to the fact that the Hermitage, which had been pleased, in the fall of 2004, to host an exhibition of paintings by “the most important Canadian artist of the first half of the 20th century, Tom Thomson,” was now equally pleased to be hosting an exhibition of paintings by “the most important Canadian artist of the second half of the 20th century—Jean-Paul Riopelle”!

Which gave one pause. And then caused the mind to race. Our most important artist of the second half of the 20th century? How could that be? Absurd. And yet…and yet… Well, let’s think: Borduas was smarter and bolder, but not so well known. Molinari stayed home all the time. Jack Bush painted pretty flowers that died fast. Well, wait, there’s Michael Snow! Yeah, but as great as the Walking Women were, he was better known for his films. So who’s left? Well…um…maybe Riopelle is the man, after all.

It doesn’t really sit right, though.

Nevertheless, the reclamation and canonization process is clearly underway. Jeffrey Spalding, Director of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, for example, notes in his alarmingly hyperbolic essay (“Immaculate Misconception”) in the MMFA’s luxurious catalogue for the exhibition that Riopelle’s works—all of his works— “are staggeringly crafted, consistently brilliant; he seems never to have had an off day. No struggle, no flaws, no work ever falls apart before our eyes. Can anyone,” he writes, “be so uniformly excellent? Riopelle orchestrates colours into displays that rival the splendours of stained-glass windows. They are, perhaps, the most beautiful abstract paintings of the twentieth century.” Then, as if already hearing the resulting howls of incredulity among readers everywhere, he adds, rather sarcastically, “Apparently, this is not a good thing.” Jean-Paul Riopelle, bound to fail.

Why is Spalding’s rapture apparently “not a good thing”? Because, he argues, he persists in seeing mastery in a painter whose work is widely regarded with “cautious, guarded enthusiasm” (if that!) as belonging to a “second generation of European contributors [to modernism],” “caught in the looming shadow” cast by Pollock and the Ab-Ex painters of the New York School and measured unfairly against issues and modes (“the rough and tumble of American swagger”) that, Spalding arguessensibly, were never his own. At any rate, the confounding irony, Spalding continues, is that Riopelle may be “among the most widely known and collected yet least respected artists of the twentieth century.”

So. Must we burn Riopelle? Why no, says Spalding—and the other contributors to the catalogue (Serge Guilbaut, François- Marc Gagnon, Stéphane Aquin and Laurier Lacroix). We must look again. And separate what he did from what he was apparently supposed to have done.

Fair enough. So what did he do?

Riopelle was born in Montreal in 1923. By the time he was 23, in 1946, he was exhibiting there with the Automatiste circle (Barbeau, Fauteux, Mousseau, Leduc and Riopelle’s mentor, Borduas). Two years later, he helped to craft the controversial manifesto Refus global (Total Refusal) and, having already made a few exploratory trips there, moved to Paris for good.

In Paris, he moves from flinging skeins of pigment at the canvas (as in Back From Spain, from 1951–52)—a painting practice that saddles his pictures with a central vanishing point and, as a result, a concomitant landscape feel that is highly characteristic of the mannerisms of Paris abstraction—to a rapid acquisition of his famous “mosaic” style. Here he replaces his former spontaneous spurts of paint with a more deliberate application to the canvas of palette-knifed chunks of pigment juxtaposed into an all-over shimmer—of which The Jacob Chatou from 1954 is an emblematic example. “Critics rave about this new technique,” writes Paul Maréchal in his catalogue commentary on the work, “and collectors line up to buy it.” That same year, Riopelle signs a contract with Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York whereby the gallery agrees to buy all his work. This is also the year Riopelle is chosen for the first time to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale (he will be chosen again, in 1962). There, he shows alongside his friend Borduas and, rather oddly, B. C. Binning. He is 31 years old.

Eventually the self-levelling, sharp-edged all-overness of Riopelle’s mosaic paintings gives way to the burgeoning-forth of freer, more sensuously painted paintings (where smearing sidles up to chunking), in which almost detachable, powerfully primal forms take centre stage (I use the theatrical image advisedly), often held in place, as in the quite delicious Dragon from 1959, by bracketing wings of pigment (creamy white ones in Dragon). This bookend format would appear more and more frequently, culminating in remarkably operatic paintings such as The Pond, from 1966, and the beautiful, icy, grey-blue triptych Ashes, from 1967.

It’s funny how you can take the painter out of his country of birth, but you can’t seem to take the country of birth out of the painter. More and more, overt references to nature begin to order Riopelle’s work (and especially his sculpture). He makes more and more trips back to Canada, to hunt and fish. Animal motifs turn up in his paintings. A series of acrylics called Ficelles (1972) is based on Inuit string games. An Arctic journey in 1973 inspires a body of work called The Kings of Thule. The next year, in 1974, he builds a studio in St. Marguerite in Quebec—and begins to make works about geese (the goose works will eventually visit much dismay upon the intractable fans of his earlier modes of painting). In 1977, he begins his Icebergs paintings, and, having returned to Canada for good in 1989, continues his imagistic preoccupation with geese, which will last until 1992. In 1994, he purchases the Manoir MacPherson, at the tip of the Îsle-aux-Grues in rural Quebec. “It’s like being on a ship,” he writes. “I can withstand long sieges, spend the winter there if necessary. An island is a ship without a sail.” He will live and work at the Manoir until his death in 2002; largely forgotten by the rest of the art world, he is nevertheless accorded a state funeral in Montreal.

What is it in Riopelle’s long career—in the skyrocket trajectory of the early part of it, and the long slow burn of the rest of it—that is so troubling? Part of its poignancy lies in his contriving always to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He settles in Paris, for example, just as the art world turns its novelty-hungry eyes to New York. As Aquin puts it, “Riopelle would never completely be able to disassociate himself from his disadvantageous affiliation with the Paris School. In 1954,” Aquin continues, “the year of his first show at the Matisse gallery, the critic Sam Hunter compared him to Pollock but found him less ‘inspirational’ and deplored his ‘fussiness’ and a certain ‘over-emphasis on virtuoso paint manipulation,’ all marks of a European style.”

And Aquin goes on to point out that unlike some of his companions—the American expatriate painter Sam Francis, for example, who was a long-time friend, and the Paris-based American painter Joan Mitchell, who was Riopelle’s companion for more than twenty years—“he could not count on the advantage of U. S. nationality when the time came to assess his oeuvre.” Riopelle was never entirely able to get past the critical chorus that accused him all his life of generating a prettified kind of Abstract Expressionism. The term “lyrical abstraction,” with which his reputation-making mosaics were most often tagged, is, in terms of serious painting, almost a contradiction in terms.

I like Riopelle’s later work: the so-called “vulgar” paintings with gold leaf, and the stencilling and spray-painting. Aquin points out how distasteful they were to French critics, who, “baffled by his return to representation, snubbed him.” So did Canadian critics. Collectors, both foreign and Canadian, balked as well.

But I think they’re raw, vital, formally inventive, albeit in perhaps a rather desperate way, and galvanizing. These are real action paintings. But unlike, say, the dependable mosaics, they are wildly uneven. They are, in fact, a pretty rough ride. Aside from François-Marc Gagnon, who argues eloquently in the catalogue (and elsewhere) that Riopelle’s late spraying techniques are related less to the work of graffiti artists (as has been dyspeptically suggested) and more to the making of “negative impressions” (spraying the object itself and then taking it away to leave the unsprayed “hole” behind), which he terms the generating of “form as an absence” (as in all those hands on the walls of the cave in Gargas, Spain), people tend to be embarrassed by them.

The Hermitage exhibition is very light on the late work. My hunch is that the MMFA, too, was embarrassed by it, and conveniently forgot to include it (there will be a great deal more of Riopelle’s work included in the show’s second mounting, at the Musée Cantini in Marseilles this winter). There is, to be sure, the artist’s Mid-Lent from 1990—in which a rollicking sprayed goose shape takes centre stage, while around it sweep what are apparently “absent” feather shapes and, as Gagnon suggests, “a few ferns and some old nails.” I was glad to see it. But it was a bit goofy to mount it on the silly slanting easel it was displayed on. Spraying—and even the act of spraying recollected in tranquility, as in this raucous painting—just doesn’t take well to life at an angle. Spraying is a vertical activity, and ought to be viewed that way.

The biggest disappointment of the Hermitage show—beyond how crowded, disparate and ad hoc the whole thing looked, I mean—is the inclusion of Riopelle’s gigantic The Ice Canoe from 1992. It gets a place of honour in Alexandra Hall, and three pages to itself in the catalogue. There is, no doubt, anthropological meaning lurking in it somewhere (as an emblem of the winter canoe race from Quebec City across the St. Lawrence; see Krieghoff, for example). But despite François-Marc Gagnon’s heroic attempt to give it poetic meaning—the idea that Riopelle’s having sprayed geese on its surfaces somehow links it to the legend of la Chasse-galerie: that “his canoe could take flight towards the unknown, under the spell of some sorcery”—well, I’m perfectly willing to grant Jean-Paul Riopelle some access to sorcery—but his canoe is definitely going nowhere.

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