CAPTURING THE SOUL OF FRENCH CANADA
HOMMAGE À JEAN PAUL LEMIEUX (1904–1990)
On view at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec City, Canada
From February 3 to April 24, 2005
Reviewed by Joshua Anchors
This exposition comprises over fifty of Lemieux’s most moving works,
including several that have never before been on exhibit. All of the
paintings discussed in this review will be on exhibit until April 24, 2005,
with the exception of Les Ursulines, which is part of the permanent
Jean Paul Lemieux exhibit scheduled for autumn 2005.
I. Les Ursulines, 1951
Six nuns stand in a courtyard. Three of them, with folded arms and tilted
heads, gaze out at the world beyond their convent. The other three stand
less dreamily in the background. One leans against a low, white wall, an
open book in her hands. Another holds a basketful of yellow ovals. The
third, standing farthest back, is the most triangular, the most rigidly
planted in her geometric space.
A young, pea-green tree hovers lightly in the distance. Like a wisp of
cirrus, it seems to float incongruously through a sober realm of cubism. A
brown cross hangs over a black doorway in a feast of right angles. A gray
summer sky looms above smokeless white chimneys. With austere tranquility,
the nuns stand in the shadowy grasses below, their elliptical faces blank
and inscrutable.
My interest in Jean Paul Lemieux’s style begins in 1951 with these nuns.
Though Lemieux was already well established in the Québec art scene by this
time, Les Ursulines constitutes his turning point from realistic
naturalism toward the minimalist simplicity that characterizes his most
powerful works. A simplicity that, as novelist Anne Hébert writes, is much
more serious and severe than his previous works and little by little won
over all his art like a great sweeping tide.
This tide helped wash away everything nonessential from his canvases,
routinely leaving them almost nude, punctuated by staggeringly distant
horizons. Horizons of a northern country, a cold expansive country where
solitude and desolation are often indistinguishable. Horizons of Québec. Yet
Les Ursulines was painted at the beginning of this period and only
hints at the great tide that is to come.
When I recently paused to study this painting at the Musée du Québec, I had
the impression that I was glimpsing over a fence to see what these nuns were
up to. It was a childlike glimpse, and what I perceived was through
childlike eyes: a group of nuns standing in a courtyard surrounded by
rectangular houses and a narrow wall. The nuns are long, black, and austere
as we imagine nuns to be, yet they are also soft and rounded, almost playful
in their form. Rigid angles carve the space around them, but they seem
unaware of this angular severity. They are simply content to be outside with
their pious thoughts.
Yet what are they thinking, these nuns, when they gaze with dreamy emptiness
out beyond the confines of the painting? What is represented by their
absence of expression? Why do three of them, or maybe four, gaze back at me
so pensively when I peer over my imaginary fence?
This is one of the great mysteries of Lemieux, this blank, lonely regard
that can be seen in the faces of so many of his subjects. The child trapped
between the canvas, the sea, and the gaze of his parents in Le Temps;
the young girl in Julie et l’univers, wearing her unforgettable
yellow jacket in the middle of a vast snowscape; the penetrating, huddled
stares of the family in 1910 Remembered.
Portraits rarely leave a viewer speechless. We either
sense what the artist wants us to feel, or the context and environs around
the portrait reveal a mood. Often there is no mystery, for a live, paid
model is perceptible beneath the layers of paint and myriad brushstrokes. Or
sometimes, as with sex, there is simply no chemistry. Yet at the recent Lemieux exhibit spectators stood motionless before his portraits, consumed
by the mysterious, childlike gazes that mingle ineffable sorrow with
disarming simplicity. One gets the impression not of looking into the eyes
of a painted figure, but rather into the heart and soul of French-Canadian
culture.
II. Le visiteur du soir, 1956
While traveling along the St. Lawrence River in Québec, the American writer
Henry Beston once wrote “Over this landscape of mountains and climbing
roads, over this great river with its shores of farming lands and gathered
villages stands a sky which, more than any other sky I have chanced to live
beneath, is blended into a noble unity with the earth below.”
The evening visitor stands far from the horizon, far from that single line
where earth and sky unite. Behind him is only the immensity of terrain, yet
somehow his figure seems to fill a terrific portion of this immensity. His
is a bulkish wintry form, again mute and expressionless like the nuns. His
solitude is pristine, his earth a blinding expanse of white and gray. He is
planted in winter, in Québec, somewhere in between the “noble unity” of the
sky and the earth.
Like the imposing visitor, the paintings from Lemieux’s “classical” period
(1956–1970) are also inexorably planted in the landscape and seasons of
Québec. The meeting of sky and earth become a landmark of Lemieux during
this period. A review in the Globe & Mail reads “There is a haunting
loneness and sense of space in his paintings of figures against far, flat
land; of roads ending in a point of vision; of landscape bounded by a far
city’s skyline…It is not gay art but it is vastly communicative.”
When I turned down the long corridor at the Musée to visit the Lemieux
exposition, I first glanced out a narrow stone window to my right and
scanned the historic Plains of Abraham. A light snow was falling, and I
could only discern black dots of people skiing and walking down below. The
horizon was an obscure whiteness in the distance.
I then looked down toward the end of the corridor and became still. Hanging
in the darkness, illuminated only by a small spotlight, was The Noon
Train, a painting so densely communicative in its nudity that it left me
breathless, leaning against the old stone wall for support.
Hauntingly similar to Le visiteur du soir, The Noon Train is a
Québec snowscape of the genre I witnessed from the museum window. A black
train carves its way through a dazzling white plain and eventually loses
itself in the horizon. The train is a rigidly straight thread in this
landscape, suspended in the ambiguous space between earth and sky. All else
is glimmering white, a breathtakingly beautiful white.
Both paintings remind me of lines from Samuel Coleridge: “Alone, alone, all,
all alone / Alone on a wide wide sea.” Though his ancient mariner is far
from iceberg-filled waters when these lines are written, they confess a
certain universality of loneliness and desolation that landscapes of oceanic
proportions can arouse in humanity. The imminence of death becomes more
lucid when one is engulfed by open nature; one is simply alone, all alone.
III. Le Cavalier, 1956
Jean Paul Lemieux once stated, “I am especially interested in conveying the
solitude of man and the ever-flowing passing of time. I try to express in my
landscapes and figures this solitude, this silence in which we all move.”
A solitary rider enters the frame in Le Cavalier, riding toward a
black line in the horizon. His very presence, his weight as matter in the
otherwise open space seems to tilt the horizon downward. An immaculate
stretch of white nothingness lies ahead of him before he will reach a
blackness that, once again, seems to be hinging between earth and sky.
Like many of Lemieux’s figures, this rider seems to have chanced his way
into a painting. His presence is uncertain, and he rides away from the
painter at a muffled gallop. His future lies ahead, in the blackness on the
horizon, and that is where many painters would wait for him. Yet Lemieux
takes us far from the rider’s stopping point, to a place where we must
imagine his journey, his destination, and his future.
A morbid imagination may have him as the Grim Reaper riding across desolate
plains in search of the weary. An imagination more gay may consider the
warmth of his destination, the mug of chocolat chaud that will soon steam in
front of him and the relief of his stabled horse.
The scene of Le Cavalier led my imagination back through history. I
considered the day when the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec was
still a provincial prison with inmates crammed in musty stone cells with a
pervasive cold radiating through the walls. The solitary horseman seems to
be escaping this harsh reality, in my imagination, and galloping toward a
raw, unpredictable freedom. That is why he is only just entering the
frame—his presence is unexpected, he has escaped.
A highlight of visiting the Musée is being able to imprison yourself for a
few moments in one of the ancient cells on the third floor. You step into
the cramped solidity of space, often hunching over, and shut the heavy
cast-iron bars. If a slit of window is across from your cell, you can see
neither the sky nor the earth, but rather that nebulous espace where sky and
earth join. To call it a horizon would be too precise. For the solitary
horseman it is his distant future, for the night visitor it is perhaps his
imminent death, and for the many other figures of Lemieux it is simply the
reality of the immense land they live upon.
IV. Julie et l’univers, 1965
The introduction to L’univers de Jean Paul Lemieux, a recently published
critical study of his work, is written by Anne Hébert who poignantly
describes the impact of Lemieux’s art on the Québecois soul. I leave you
with her words: “Il nous faut faire le silence en nous. Ce silence profond
qui nous permet seul d’entendre le prodigieux silence de l’univers, à la
fois austère et splendide, de Lemieux. Plus que le silence, c’est
l’invisible qui rôde, qui demande à être capté par nous. Car nous sommes
invités à cette contemplation. À cet au-delà. Inutile d’essayer de nous
dérober à l’invitation pressante. À la convocation hors du temps. Pourquoi
tenter de fuir comme certains personnages des tableaux, tout au bord du
cadre? Préférons-nous donc à ce point la vie ordinaire? Elle est là partout,
la vie ordinaire, sur la toile. C’est elle et ce n’est plus elle. La
transfiguration a eu lieu. Un grand peintre a pris notre pays natal et l’a
fait passer au crible de son coeur singulier.”
Reproduction rights for the above images have been generously granted by the
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
