Lot 41: Jean Albert McEwen 1923 - 1999 Canadian oil on

Jean Albert McEwen 1923 - 1999 Canadian oil on canvas Tableau de la Nuit de Noël 20 x 20 inches 50.8 x 50.8 centimeters signed and on verso signed, titled ""Tableau de la Nuit de Noöl"" [sic] and dated 1970 Provenance:Private Collection, Toronto What are we to make of the title of this gorgeous little painting? There it is, written in the artist's hand on the back of the painting, Tableau de la Nuit de Noël; and once we know that, a gamut of Christmas associations fill our memories - of family celebrations, of Père Noël and present giving, of carol singing, Midnight Mass and the joyful elevation of the spirit. But titles are not necessarily reliable guides to the subject matter when it comes to abstract art, and abstract painters mostly avoid them. Jean McEwen, however, rarely shied away from titles. Sometimes he applied them merely as formal descriptions, naming the colours or pointing to some structural feature. But just as often he seems to want to evoke a more specific kind of content, consciously predisposing our perceptions and interpretations of a painting's visual appearance and emotional resonances. But what do these almost automatically triggered romantic Christmas nostalgias really have to do with McEwen's painting? After all, is Tableau de la Nuit de Noël not an abstract painting, or ostensibly so? It is a simple flattened tripartite composition, with a centrally placed column whose somber brownish green has been starkly contrasted to the swirling, patchy all-over colour patterns that fill the flanking fields. These are dominated by a smoldering rich orange-red and a sumptuous cobalt blue whose opulence is emboldened by the darkness at the painting's centre. The paint surface itself is quite palpable, stirring touch as much as sight.The painting is, and remains, a tangible object. But within the swirls and smears and beds of its layers of paint, the eye soon conjures forth illusory and mysterious spaces, with shallows to shun and depths to probe, while searing light shines from behind occluding shadows. Suddenly, prey to some other personal disposition, I wish for a different title - Winter Twilight, perhaps. The central column, densely brownish green and here and there modulated by little dabs of brighter colours, now rises like the roughly barked trunk of a stolid tree. Emanating away from the tree trunk spreads a thicket of intertwining branches through which glows the red light of the late afternoon setting sun. The shadow side of this forest screen, dominating the foreground picture plane, has been blued by the mystical northern twilight. It is not a fanciful reading. During McEwen's formative year as an abstract painter in Paris, in the company of Jean Paul Riopelle and the American painter Sam Francis, he had participated in the rediscovery of the almost forgotten late work of Claude Monet from Giverny. For McEwen, it was not so much the water lily paintings that mattered, but Monet's pictures of weeping willow trees. In these, central trunks sprout light-dappled amorphous masses of foliage whose pattern of light and shadow satiate the space and surface of his canvases from edge to edge. In 1973, not that long after the execution of Tableau de la Nuit de Noël, McEwen told the critic Fernande Saint-Martin that he had worked out how to express the vibration of colour in his paintings from looking at "the lattice of lights and shadows that formed by the crossing of light through branches and leaves." Is the title of Tableau de la Nuit de Noël best left untranslated? Perhaps it is not literally a "tableau," or a "painting" or a "picture" of Christmas Eve, but instead a painting made on the occasion of la Nuit de Noël. Is it not rather a "tableau", like a "tableau d'autel", an altarpiece - a triptych even - but one in which the artist, instead of telling traditional stories, offers us a resplendent vision of sublime nature as a secular equivalent to the December season's longing for spiritual transcendence? We thank Roald Nasgaard, author of Abstract Painting in Canada, for contributing the above essay.