Lot 30: Jean-Paul Armand Mousseau 1927 - 1991 Canadian oil

Jean-Paul Armand Mousseau 1927 - 1991 Canadian oil on board La Marseillaise 40 x 30 inches 101.6 x 76.2 centimeters signed and dated 1954 Literature:Zeitgenössische Kunst in Kanada - Contemporary Art in Canada, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1959, page 10, reproduced page 16 Jean Sarrazin, ""Promesses tenues?"", La Presse, March 26, 1960, page 38 Michel Grenon, L'image de la Révolution française au Québec 1789 - 1989, 1989, pages 201 and 202, reproduced on the cover Denise Leclerc, The Crisis of Abstraction in Canada: The 1950s, National Gallery of Canada, 1992, pages 67, 158 and 222, reproduced page 157 Pierre Landry, Francine Couture and François-Marc Gagnon, Mousseau, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 1996, pages 18 and 146, reproduced page 95 Provenance:Galerie Denyse Delrue, Montreal Private Collection, Montreal Exhibited:Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Winnipeg Show, 1955 Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, Zeitgenössische Kunst in Kanada - Contemporary Art in Canada, March 14 - April 12, 1959, catalogue #28 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, The Crisis of Abstraction in Canada: The 1950s, March 12 May 24, 1993, traveling to Musée du Québec, Quebec City, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, the Glenbow Museum, Calgary and the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 1993 1994 Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Mousseau, January 24 - April 27, 1997, catalogue #127 When the late Michel Grenon chose to use La Marseillaise for the cover of his book about the perception of the French Revolution in Quebec from 1789 to 1989, he remarked that the only people in Quebec during the period he was covering in his book who had a positive view of the French Revolution were the artists, particularly the Automatists. It is a fact that in the manifesto Refus Global (Total Refusal) you have a section entitled Commentaries on some current words where one finds a long entry on revolution written by Automatist Paul-Émile Borduas. He mentioned, among other things, the famous motto of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity! In the Automatist group, Jean-Paul Mousseau was the youngest member, and was particularly interested in social change and in the integration of art into society. His commissioned works in the Metro of Montreal are well known. He came from a rather poor background of people struggling during the thirties to make a living, and when he was sent to Collège Notre-Dame in Montreal, he knew it was with considerable financial sacrifice from his family. There he had the chance to meet Brother Jérôme, who discovered his artistic talent, and was soon in contact through Fernand Leduc - who taught art with Jérôme - with the Automatists. The Marseillaise, as everybody knows, is the national anthem of France. It is not by chance that in his painting Mousseau used, along with black, the colours of the French flag: blue, white and red. But the Marseillaise was connected with the French Revolution. Composed in Strasbourg on April 25, 1792, it became the rallying call of the Revolution. A young volunteer from Montpellier called François Mireur had sung it at a patriotic gathering in Marseille, and it received its name because it was first sung on the streets by volunteers from Marseille upon their arrival in Paris. Mousseau painted La Marseillaise in 1954, and it was sent to The Winnipeg Show the year after, where it won a first prize, but it was soon in the middle of a controversy. For some members of the Women's Committee of the Winnipeg Art Gallery who sponsored the show with the Art Students' Club of the University of Manitoba, Mousseau's painting was the example par excellence of what modernist art was capable of. To others, it was the epitome of what was wrong with modern art, bringing the question of the legitimacy of abstraction into the public arena. Mousseau didn't help by declaring to journalists that his painting expressed some "cosmic forces", a vocabulary borrowed from Claude Gauvreau, the poet of the group. He also indicated that the title came to him after he finished the painting, meaning that he started, in good Automatist fashion, without a preconceived idea. This is hard to believe, considering the obvious choice of colours. In fact, Mousseau succeeded in making a powerful statement expressing an insuperable hope of freedom out of the dark period into which, in his eyes, the Maurice Duplessis regime (which was in power until 1959) had plunged Quebec at the time. The colour of the French flag seems literally to emerge from the darkness and proclaim a new era of liberty. Or does this say too much? The Quiet Revolution was yet to come, but one could say that Mousseau's La Marseillaise was a premonitory sign of its approach. We thank François-Marc Gagnon of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute of Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, for contributing the above essay.