Lot 2: Claude Tousignant 1932 - Canadian oil on canvas

Claude Tousignant 1932 - Canadian oil on canvas diptych Double 36 (Mars Phthalocyanine) 36 diameter (each) inches 91.4 diameter (each) centimeters on verso signed only on the green-and-yellow work, titled on each, dated 1974 on each and stamped with the Tousignant stamp on each Literature:Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, 2007, page 191 Provenance:Estate of Arthur Erickson, Vancouver Claude Tousignant emerged from the ferment of creativity in Montreal in the late 1940s, having been a student at the School of Art and Design at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In the 1950s, Tousignant leapt through a number of directions in abstraction, from a tachist application influenced by the Automatists to flat simple colour planes derived from his interest in Piet Mondrian. The 1960s saw Tousignant's work enter into the realm of colourful Op Art, and his stated intent was to create an art "emptied of all extraneous matter - to the point at which painting is pure sensation."" At this time, the circle was Tousignant's main structural element, with works referred to as targets, chromatic transformers, gongs and chromatic accelerators, and this continued into the 1970s. He painted a group of circular diptychs, such as this vibrant duo, in which he explored their chromatic relationships. Double 36 (Mars Phthalocyanine) contains a vital contrast between a bright blue, yellow and green circle and a monochromatic grey and black one. These pure, reductive paintings are pulsating icons of chromatic space, radiating their optical stimulus for us to experience.