THE PARIS YEARS 1953- 1966 MARCELLE FERRON Mayberry Fine Art Toronto October 26- November 29 Archives Marcelle Ferron MARCELLE FERRON 1924 - 2001 Marcelle Ferron was born in Louiseville, Quebec, in 1924. At the age of seven she lost her mother and her father moved the family to the country, hoping the rural environment would be good for his children. Ferron suffered from tuberculosis in early childhood and frequent stays in the hospital forged in her an independent spirit. Following high school, she studied at the college Marguerite- Bourgeois and then registered at the Quebec Ecole des Beaux-arts. Ferron quit before finishing her studies, finding that the instruction did not fit her idea of modern art. After a few years of experimentation she met Paul-Emile Borduas. He became her mentor and introduced her to a new abstract style of painting. Under his tutelage, Ferron formulated an approach to painting which allowed her to express her own personal vision. In 1946 she joined the group of painters known as the Automatistes. She exhibited with them and began to gain recognition in the art world. When the Automatiste group disbanded in 1953, Marcelle Ferron decided to move to France. !1 She separated from her husband and left for France with her three daughters. She settled in Clamart, a suburb of Paris, where she lived and kept her studio. She concentrated on painting, making this a very productive period. Full of light, her strong abstract works caught the attention of gallery owners and influential figures in the French art world. Among these was Herta Wescher, who helped her to organize exhibits throughout Europe. In Paris, Ferron also made connections with many other artists, such as Leon Bellefleur and Jean-Paul Riopelle. The period she spent in France was extremely significant for her career as a painter. When she returned to Quebec in 1966 she was an internationally-known artist. Back in Quebec she met the glass maker, Michel Blum. She found that working with glass allowed her to explore light and colour more fully. In collaboration with a team of glass technicians, she invented a method that allowed her to build walls of light. She inserted antique coloured glass between sheets of clear glass, perfecting a method by which the joints were made invisibly. Her first major glass achievement was the mural for Expo 67. However, it was the glass wall that she created for the Champ-de-Mars metro station that made her known to the Quebec public. These works lead to many glass art commissions for public spaces. During this period Marcelle Ferron also taught architecture and art at the University Laval. She returned to painting around 1985. In 1983, she was the first woman to receive the Prix Paul-Emile- Borduas. Among her other honours was the silver medal she won at Marcelle Ferron, Outremont, 1995 the Sao Paolo Biennieal in Brazil in 1961. The Government of Quebec recognized her contribution to Quebec culture with the Ordre national du Quebec. It should be noted that Marcelle Ferron was an early feminist who, with daring, faced and overcame many obstacles. A woman of integrity, she was devoted to her art, insisting that she did not paint for collectors. Painting, rather, was her passion. She broke ground for women artists in Canada today. Marcelle Ferron died in 2001. The famous Quebec writers, Jacques Ferron and Madeleine Ferron are her brother and sister. !2 Marcelle Ferron in Paris, 1953-1966 Context matters: It sets conditions, offers competition, provides nourishment. Marcelle Ferron’s choice to leave Canada for France in October 1953 presented a context for thirteen years of intense development. This exhibition focuses on Marcelle Ferron’s thirteen years in France during which she painted manifestations of light that fundamentally altered her art and led to achievements impossible for her to attain in Canada. She began her art studies in Quebec City with Jean-Paul Lemieux when she was eighteen. Dissatisfied, she left and studied with Paul-Émile Borduas in Montreal from 1945 to 1948. Still in her mid-twenties, she was a signatory to the culturally revolutionary Refus Global in 1948, and as a twenty-nine year old mother of three young children she sailed to France in 1953. Borduas’s openness as a teacher, and the centrality of the individual to his thought in the context of Quebec’s repressive culture during the Grande Noirceur opposed the menace of hierarchies, and emphasized the importance of the individual.1 As the last painter to join the Automatistes, Ferron stepped directly into an ethos of artistic and personal sovereignty. Departing Quebec was essential for her to broaden her horizons. In retrospect, Ferron’s interest in light distinguishes her from her peers and transcends her œuvre. Misplaced, not lost, in the shuffle of the historiographies of the intrepid breakthroughs of Paul-Émile Borduas into the materiality of paint and Jean Paul Riopelle into facture and surface, Ferron’s singularity is glaring. She gleaned from Borduas that paint is always material, not a tool for mimicking the visible world, and that its materiality could be the content of a painting. Her unique vehicle was light, and from the middle 1940s to the early 2000s it was ever-present. Where Borduas dealt with the materiality of paint as an unyielding opaque and plastic material, Ferron extended herself through her rejuvenation in France. Retour d’Italiie (1953 / 1954) carries Borduas’s influence in a painting he would never have painted. She creates sensual effects of light that Borduas denied while both artists embraced the primacy of the creative act and commitment to painting as an individual context of discovery and exploration. Where Riopelle’s painting was concerned with the application of paint and its enthralling effects, neither he nor Borduas had Ferron’s deep, career-long motivation to mine oil paint’s luminosity. In contrast to an artist like Rita Letendre’s works of the early 1960s that are also indebted to Borduas in their structure and form, Ferron clearly established an artistic ambition instead of a sequence of stylistic approaches. Ferron’s individuality – one that affected her personal and artistic lives – made her art hard to follow at times. In retrospect, her continued interest in light clarifies her art. At its core, the enduring radicality of Automatisme is artistic more than it is social. Pictorial space was fundamental to the Automatistes and is distinct from the space 1 Patricia Smart, “Un lieu d’égalité pour les femmes?” Vie des arts, vol. 42, no. 170 (Spring 1998): 43. Page 1 of 3 portrayed in French Surrealist painting. For Ferron, French Surrealists such Yves Tanguy or Salvador Dalì made paintings mired in Renaissance perspective suggestive of décor, not painting.2 She noticed Borduas briefly touched on that kind of form, but she and her younger colleagues Pierre Gauvreau and Jean-Paul Mousseau were able to skip that step. More to her interest, Max Ernst’s paintings of the 1930s and 1940s contained an equivocal, restless space. On her easel, any allusion to landscape and terrain was obliterated by the non-objective. If Ferron’s material existence in France was not much better than in Canada, the context of other ambitious artists showing individually and in groups granted legitimacy and opportunity otherwise impossible in Canada. L’abstraction lyrique (lyrical abstraction) paralleled Tachisme in France and differed in its emphatic, lyric, painterliness. In contrast to some of the geometric tendencies of Tachisme, Ferron and fellow lyric abstractionists Hans Hartung, Nicolas de Staël, and Zao Wou-ki, shared open, intuitive, compositions that are as much traces in time as they are images to behold. A year after her arrival she was in a group exhibition in Paris, a solo at Galerie du Haut- Pavé in Paris the next year, and solos in Brussels and in Montreal in 1956. In Paris in November-December 1958, Ferron was included in an exhibition unimaginable in Canada, A propos du baroque at Galerie Kléber where she showed with Sam Francis, Simon Hantaï, Shirley Jaffe, Joan Mitchell, Judit Reigl, and Jean-Paul Riopelle. Within this context of ambitious international painters she knew and admired Sam Francis. His paintings of the middle and late 1950s with their active surfaces, resolute use of white, and vibrating light help in understanding Ferron’s compositions of the early 1960s.3 Her Parisian context allowed her to make and find a market for grand format paintings like this exhibition’s breathtaking 74-3/4 by 98-1/2 inch Sans titre of 1960 bought that year for the Peter Stuyvesant Collection in Amsterdam. Whether massive, like the Stuyvesant painting, or intimate, like the 20 by 24 inch Sans titre of the same year also in this exhibition, each canvas is its own context for viewing and being. Both share white grounds and passages of deep red, yellow ochre, deep chrome green, ultramarine blue and Vandyke brown. The smaller Sans titre is intensively engaged because Ferron could reach any part of the canvas at any moment with her palette knife. Her omni-directional planes of colour overlap a dense nucleus of colour and strokes. The achievement of the massive 1960 Sans titre is categorical. While Ferron’s strokes were determined by the limits of her reach, her use of a large squeegee emphasizes imperative pulsing from the painting’s horizon as she pulled paint from or toward it. This rare opportunity to see the majestic 1960 grand format painting for the first time since it set the artist’s current auction record in June 2010 affirms its place among her greatest achievements.