Essay

The following text is reproduced with the kind permission of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

 

Rita Letendre has yet to be claimed by Toronto — many still think of her as a Montreal artist — yet Torontonians have lived alongside her work for many decades. Her masterfully bold, brightly painted arrows and blocks of colour have adorned public city spaces such as the Royal Bank Plaza, the Glencairn subway station, and the Neill-Wycik Co-operative College residence at Ryerson University. When a skyscraper covered her mural at Ryerson, there were protests in the streets. After decades of making works in this city, Letendre remains well-loved but not well-known. Changing that is one of the hopes of Rita Letendre: Fire & Light, an exhibition that includes the Art Gallery of Ontario’s important collection of her work as well as a number of loans, which together show the shifts in her practice from the 1960s to the 2000s.

 

Letendre (1928-2021) landed in Montreal in 1942 during Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, an era that saw the Quebecois throw off the suffocating ideology of the Catholic Church as well as British economic and cultural domination. It was a time of growing confidence, interest, and resurgence in Quebecois culture, which meant experimentation, passionate conversations on ideas, and the desire to make a unique, independent mark on the works. The arts became a central place to explore and express this new energy. At the age of fourteen, Letendre moved to Montreal with her Abenaki/Quebecois mother, Quebecois/Mohawk father, and her six siblings. They left her birthplace, Drummondville, Quebec, to find their way out of poverty by working in the city.

 

Without planning to, Letendre wound up studying at the École des beaux-arts from 1948 to 1949. She was introduced to the school by a patron at the coffee shop where she worked, who wanted to encourage her growth as an artist. Up until that point, she had been self-taught, learning from the work of the European masters and Indigenous artists, such as the Aztecs, in catalogues and art books from her local library. Ulysse Comtois, a fellow student who became a long-time friend and companion, introduced Letendre to the Automatiste circle that had formed around Paul-Émile Borduas. Today, she cites Borduas as one of the largest influences on her as an artist. She remains committed to the spirit of the Automatistes as laid out in their 1948 manifesto, Refus global, spearheaded by Borduas. The Refus demanded freedom in artistic expression — an art beyond figuration, representation and rational control of the formal elements.[1] According to the manifesto, artists needed to make way for magic, objective mysteries, love, passionate acts, and spontaneity by

 

breaking with all conventions of society and its utilitarian spirit! We refuse to live knowingly at less than our spiritual and physical potential; refuse to close our eyes to the vices and confidence tricks perpetuated in the guise of learning, favour, or gratitude; refuse to be ghettoed in an ivory tower, well-fortified but too easy to ignore; refuse to remain silent… refuse to serve and to be used for such ends, refuse all intention, evil weapon of reason — down with them, to second place.[2]

 

For Letendre, this way of working exploded the division of expression, intuition, emotion and painting:

 

I felt that Borduas and the Automatistes were creating a brand-new world, and I was fascinated by the freedom of thought and action they showed. I wanted to be a great painter — not famous, just a great painter. It’s not the same thing. I needed to do something special, to make my contribution. It also seemed I Had something to say, an overpowering rage that nothing could hold back.[3]

 

Her rage could well have sprung up as resistance to the violence she experienced as a child just for being Abenaki; a society that kept many in grinding poverty and its attendant social problems; a culture of deep religious conservatism; and a ridiculous world where the fact of being a woman limited all of one’s endeavours. Automatism fit the revolutionary attitude in Quebec society and the deep desire to live intensely, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have put it; to live by saying yes to life in all its messy, painful, joyous beauty. Letendre was very much a product of this time and had its spirit flowing through her. It is this fire that would become Letendre’s trademark and part of her unique contribution to modernism. Her rage allowed her the confidence to commit to a risky style of painting where the paint is applied directly to the canvas with spatula, brush, or hands. There is no pre-planning the use of the canvas surface, no premixing colour, no pre-meditation in application or colour, and no rational divisions of space.

 

Letendre explains why she became committed to automatic abstraction by 1950:

 

Representation suddenly seemed to me like a crutch. I had discovered that the soul of a painting was not in the object represented but in the way it transmitted a sort of internalized emotion. That the head of a woman on a canvas would never be anything other than the head of a woman, except in what one could read in it of tension, innocence, sensuality…[4]

 

Comtois and Letendre left their traditional beaux arts education after only a year and a half at school in order to join a movement, Automatism, that was threatening to many in the conservation Montreal art scene. Many art manifestos — including the Surrealist Manifestos of the 1920s — had previously argued for art’s place in social transformation. The threat these provocative positions posed to the established order was evident in Borduas being fired from his teaching post and effectively exiled to America after he wrote the Refus. This era of abstraction started in the spirit of revolt, before art history and the white cube tamed it.

 

Letendre had exhibited with the Automatistes before breaking out in the famous and controversial Les Automatistes exhibition La matière chante (April 20 – May 4, 1954) curated by Paul-Émile Borduas. She exhibited four works created in 1954: Broadway aux chouettes, Jazz à Amsterdam, Adieu Sésame, and Bwana. The catalogue for the exhibition states that “Letendre having broken away from the surrealist tradition applies herself to the creation of a purely plastic entity. With an ardent love of colour, she has organized life-like squares of light in a play of multiple planes”. While testing geometric shapes, she maintained a gestural approach to paint application in a lyrical sensibility in layered shapes without hard edges. In 1955, Letendre exhibited in Espace 55 (February 11-28) at the Musée des beaux-arts in Montreal. Her work elicited disapproval from Borduas, who returned from New York to view the important show. He critiqued her paintings as “too geometric and rational” and unfaithful to his ideas. Due to this, her work became associated with another group of painters, les Plasticiens, who believed that “creation that is also intuition is the sole form of truth”.[5] Guido Molinari — who rejected the Automatistes’ spontaneous style of painting in favour of a more structured, harmonious geometric style — became head of exhibitions at the café-bar L’Échouerie, a small cooperative gallery (a ten-metre long wall with a bar) run by Letendre’s friends. It is here that Letendre had her first solo exhibition, in 1955. Molinari gave her another solo exhibition in 1956 at his newly opened gallery, L’Actuelle. Throughout the late 1950s, Letendre continued to show a distinct preference for experimenting with luminosity and movement that began to distinguish her work from that of her male counterparts and became a defining aspect of her work throughout her more than six-decade career.

 

No label fits Letendre perfectly, as her influences have been drawn from diverse movements and tendencies. She belongs to the romantic tradition because of her focus on the evocative qualities of light and colour, which were categorically rejected by les Plasticiens. However, influenced by les Plasticiens, Letendre has maintained an interest in the plastic, or formal, elements of painting: “Tone, texture, forms, lines and the ultimate unity that is the painting and the relationship between those elements.”[6] Likewise, she is committed to the experimental nature of the act of painting: “The Plasticiens do not accept a priori postulates about what is elementary and what is perfect. For them, these are not givens, but attainments made possible only by working individually with the utmost freedom.”[7] In 1956, Letendre joined the Non-figurative Artists’ Association of Montreal (NFAAM), formed to promote the work of non-figurative artists (who preferred the term “non-figurative” to “abstraction”, which was associated with geometric abstraction in the work of European artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and the De Stijl group). As to the more formal aspects of Letendre’s work, her influences are the abstract expressionism of Franz Kline and, from the opposite end of the spectrum, the post-painterly abstraction of Frank Stella.

 

Throughout her career, Letendre has found a variety of ways to work through the seemingly impossible unification of expressionism, lyrical abstraction, and hard-edged abstraction. By the time she had her first American retrospective at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 1974, she had developed her signature hard-edged style of arrows and wedges that move rapidly across large canvases, originating and exploding beyond the frame of the canvas while vibrating in striations of colour. This style is exemplified in several works included in the Fire & Light exhibition: Sun Song (1969), Lodestar (1970), Midnight Light (1970), Omm (1972), Klingit (1973), and Malapeque I (1973). In the catalogue for the Palm Springs retrospective, Parisian art historian Charles Delloye wrote in Art d’aujourd’hui about Letendre’s lyricism:

 

In Rita Letendre, we find the necessary intrusion of inhibition, of stifling and of closing in whirling dynamism, in the unceasing and always temporary surging (up) of vitality. We have the obsessing shadow of absence and of vehemence behind the treacherously serene and refined harmony of presence. These are all themes touched upon in different but equally intense ways, in the essential (basic) depths of lyricism.[8]

 

In the early 1960s, before Letendre’s era of hard-edged arrows and wedges, she had begun to explore luminosity and dynamism by bringing two masses into conflict with each other. In these paintings, the masses were often colour in heavy impastos against thick black paint, which create an oscillation between foreground and background as coloured masses move through black, or black masses swirl into and through colour. The points at which the coloured masses collide were produced both quickly and carefully with a spatula. Two examples that show this type of transition are Espaces changeants (1964) and Impact (1964). Letendre started with oil and worked with thick layers to get the effect.

 

By 1964, she had ended her 15-year relationship with Ulysse Comtois and in March of the year moved to Los Angeles with her new partner, Kosso Eloul. Letendre was immediately commissioned to do a large, seven-and-a-half by six-metre mural, Sunforce, at the University of California, Long Beach. She quickly realized that the effect of heavy impasto would not be effective for a mural positioned high above passersby unless the paint was impossibly thick. In response, in the words of Gaston Roberge, “the artist discovered that she could create the desired effect on a flat plane, using lighter colours to accentuate the flashes of light caused by the collision of the masses. The background was bright yellow, the masses green and black.”[9] For this mural she pioneered the use of epoxy paints. In 1969, Letendre and Eloul moved to Toronto, staying half-time in New York.

 

In 1971, her hard-edged paintings became a signature style, further developed through the innovative use of the airbrush, which in turn became commonplace in many of her murals and canvases. By the 1980s, Letendre’s work with the airbrush reached its epic in works like Daybreak (1983). The use of an airbrush gave her considerable control over texture and coverage so she could execute pure, flat, evenly distributed colour arrows. The airbrush, coupled with tape, allowed for the colours to be butted up against each other in perfect lines. She also experimented with the ability of the airbrush nozzle to execute both firm and diffuse lines next to each other, breaking away from strict hard edges. For more than a decade, Letendre’s arrows became more diffuse, until her paintings became hazy horizontal transitions of colour recalling the tradition of colour field abstractions influenced by Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. In colour field painting, figure and ground are indistinguishable and there are no masses taking centre stage. Daybreak displays a mature colour field abstraction. The painting is predominantly ultramarine, cobalt blue deep, cadmium orange, and cadmium red deep, arranged in horizontal bands and applied in horizontal passes with an airbrush. Letendre’s contrast of deep, cool blue lines with radiant red and orange have an expansive quality of the infinite that cannot be contained within a title like Daybreak. Not exactly an abstracted landscape of a sunrise, this work points to the whole notion of a tomorrow, of the affective quality of a dawning day, and breathes a sense of what newness feels like — a perfect sense to provide in its original place at the Toronto General Hospital. Letendre kept combining the hard-edged arrows in a variety of ways, sometimes reminiscent of a highway in steep perspective, with the diffuse bands of colour fading into each other, like in Aforim (1975), Tabori (1976), and The Dream of the Midsummer Night’s Dream (1987).

 

In 1987, Letendre dispensed with the hard edge and airbrush entirely, but kept horizontal bands of colour and began working again with oil paint in a return to her more gestural style of painting, as can be seen in Echoes (1987) and Arctic Sun (1990), as well as in the circular motif displayed in The Wild Wind (1992). In the late 1990s, Letendre’s rage returned in black, reds, blues, and oranges vigorously applied with brushes, spatulas, and her hands in an attempt to process the emotional devastation of the death of her lifelong love and husband, Kosso Eloul, in 1995. As Letendre says, “the explosion of colours is my rebellion in the face of sadness, death, and anguish.”[10]. Works like Une symphonie fantastique (1997), Fandango (1998), Life and Passion, The Magic Circle (1998), and Fire and Thunder (1999) show this return to her gestural tendencies of the 1950s and 60s. Works like Kyrie (2000), Crescendo (2000) and Eroica (2001) give a sense of hope, healing, and transcendence in the yellow, blue, red, and white light that seems to burst and swirl from the centre of the canvas. The works also exhibit the constant motion that has always interested Letendre — but in the gestural style, motion seems to set the canvas on fire.

 

When I first met Rita Letendre, she was already in her 80s, and as highly productive as ever, since beginning her professional painting carrer in the 1940s. I was struck by her passion for life and her philosophical attitude towards understanding the spirit of that life. These aspects of who she is inform the force of her work. She reminded me so much of her contemporary, Gaston Miron, the poet of the Quiet Revolution, who I also had the pleasure of knowing before he died in 1996. Letendre and Miron share a joie de vivre — a philosophy of life that means one must be completely oneself at all times, regardless of being socially sanctioned or not — and their work is affected by the pleasure that resides in this way of being. For them, spontaneity, creativity, passion, emotionalism, and beauty are the main drivers in the creative endeavour to make visible the invisible side of reality — the unseen, unspoken, the absent. This joie de vivre calls for being fully present in the moment with one’s feelings. The connection between these two artists runs deep, suggesting that Letendre is a poet in painting.

 

Letendre is a master of colour and light; the fiery quality of her work is significant to what makes it beautiful. Light moves through her work like a beacon of hope, a pathway to somewhere else, and as uncontainable futurity. Her use of colour and the sheer monumental size of her paintings tend to create for the viewer the impression of being engulfed: we walk inside and wrap them around us, finding insights into the spirit of life through our embodied response.

 

Her paintings achieve unity even while maintaining conflict — between two masses in space and her early gestural works, or in the vibrations created through fine shifts and contrasts of colour in her later hard-edged paintings. She brings a freedom to abstraction, an emotionalism or lyricism that touches people’s hearts. Her colours vibrate in completely distinct ways that changed the way paintings can be said to be in motion.

 

Letendre’s work is grounded in the metaphorical and spiritual qualities of light, darkness, colour, and movement in an ongoing commitment to the process of discovery of the self. By the 1960s, she had discovered that emotions are the ground of self-discovery, and their expression led to experimentations in the formal qualities and the physical act of painting. Victoire (1961) is among the largest works she made at the time. The painting was singled out as the pièce de resistance at Toronto’s Here & Now Gallery in 1962, Letendre’s first solo exhibition outside Montreal. At this time, Letendre had reached an international audience, exhibiting in New York and the National Gallery of Canada. Over the course of her career, New York City, Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, Winnipeg, Tel Aviv, Quebec City, and Montreal are only some of the locations where Letendre has lived and exhibited.

 

Letendre is an extremely rare modernist: an Indigenous woman working in what is often considered to be a white male field. Letendre has said she is just “Rita”, and that being a woman, or an Indigenous person, has not mattered for her art practice. I think she was responding to the way writers, critics, collectors, and curators can reduce an artist to these identity markers, which in turn limits how people will experience the artwork. Throughout Letendre’s lifetime, she has felt constrained by how people wrote about her work through the lens of being an Indigenous woman. Today, we can be more nuanced and less reductive. We can recognize that being an Indigenous woman has influenced her because it’s part of her spirit, even while that’s not all that goes into her work. For instance, Letendre maintains that her taste for striking contrasts between bright or warm colours and stark blacks has its source in her Abenaki heritage. The wedges and arrows in traditional Abenaki art suggest potential influences, and point toward a long Indigenous lineage of abstraction. I hope audiences and scholars explore these threads further. When I saw how moved Letendre became when relating the story of going to an Abenaki reserve and being told she belonged within that community, I knew we had to celebrate her in all her facets. Everything that she is is in her work. Her passion’s path meant a certain desire for freedom from anything that would corral her art; in a world that knows very little about growing up an Abenaki woman, being pigeonholed is a very practical fear. And yet, ignoring her heritage now does a disservice to the totality of who she is — the boundaries she broke and the paths she struck, for which we are eternally grateful.

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Source: Rita Letendre: Fire & Light, Art Gallery of Ontario, foreword by Stephan Jost, with essays by Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik, Toronto, 2017, 112 pages.

 

ISBN 978-1-894243-97-1

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[1] The "formal elements" are the parts used to make a piece of artwork. The art elements are line, shape, form, tone, texture, pattern, colour, and composition.

[2] ”Refus Global”, Documents in Canadian Art, ed. Douglas Fetherling (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 121.

[3] Gaston Roberge, Rita Letendre: Woman of Light (Laval, QC: Belle Publisher, 1997), 12.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jauran, "Manifeste des plasticiens", The Plasticiens and Beyond: Montreal 1955-1970, eds. Roald Nasgaard and Michel Martin (Montreal and Markham, ON: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Varley Art Gallery of Markham, 2013), 152. Signatories: Louis Belzile, Jauran, Jean-Paul Jéôme et Fernand Toupin.

[6] Ibid., 151.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Charles Delloye, "Lyrical Abstraction", Rita Letendre (Palm Springs, CA :Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1974), n.p.

[9] Roberge, Rita Letendre: woman of Light, 14-16.

[10] Hedwige Asselin, ed. Rita Letendre: Les Éléments/The Elements (Montreal: Editions Simon Blais, 2001), 6.