Lot 14: Paul-Émile Borduas 1905 - 1960 Canadian oil on canvas Chinoiserie

Paul-Émile Borduas 1905 - 1960 Canadian oil on canvas Chinoiserie
23 1/2 x 28 3/4 inches 59.7 x 73 centimeters signed and dated 1956 and on verso titled on the Roberts Gallery label and alternatively titled Birches, Winter on the Laing Galleries label Literature:Two Canadian Painters: Paul-Émile Borduas - Harold Town, Gallery Arthur Tooth and Sons Ltd., 1958, reproduced page 9
François-Marc Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas (1905 - 1960), Biographie critique et analyse de l'oeuvre, 1978, pages 401, 418, 449, 501 and 529 and reproduced figure 103
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting, The Logic of the Gaze, 1983, page 89
Provenance:Acquired directly from the Artist by Gallery Arthur Tooth and Sons Ltd., London, England, February 21, 1957
Laing Galleries, Toronto
Roberts Gallery, Toronto
An Important Private Estate, Toronto Exhibited:Gallery Arthur Tooth and Sons Ltd., London, England, Two Canadian Painters: Paul-Émile Borduas - Harold Town, October 7 - 25, 1958, catalogue #7 Chinoiserie was purchased in Paul-Émile Borduas's Paris studio on February 21, 1957 - along with three other pictures - by M. Cochrane, director of Gallery Arthur Tooth and Sons in London, England. This gallery would exhibit Borduas's work a few times, and our painting was exhibited from October 7 to 25, 1958, in a joint show with the Toronto artist Harold Town, under the title Two Canadian Painters: Paul-Émile Borduas - Harold Town. Alan Jarvis, then director of the National Gallery of Canada, wrote the preface of the catalogue published on that occasion. Blair Laing of Laing Galleries in Toronto bought it from Tooth and brought it back to Canada to sell it to a Canadian collector.
Chinoiserie belongs to a series of paintings from 1956, such as Danses éphémères, Graphisme and Griffes malicieuses, in which Borduas seemed to want to keep something of the fluidity and graphic quality of the watercolours he had made two years earlier in the medium of oil, at a time in which he was under the influence of New York painting, especially that of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. In Chinoiserie, he sometimes used the painting knife on its edge, instead of using the blade flat on the canvas to get some linear effects. But sometimes the blade slipped and, instead of tracing a line, created subtle "passages", so to speak, like Paul Cézanne did, which described the melting of one colour into another one. The pictorial area seems open and lines surge from outside the painting's periphery, especially from the bottom of the canvas. The gentle touch, like skimming on the surface of the white paint, suggested the presence of Chinese landscape in Borduas's imagination - he had always been fascinated by Chinese painting. He had in his personal library Art of the Far East: Landscape, Flowers, Animals, which included "16 Plates in Colour from the Work of Old Chinese and Japanese Masters" and an introduction by Laurence Binyon. At the end of his life, Borduas wanted to travel to Japan, and was certainly attracted by the minimalism of Oriental art. Nevertheless, the word "chinoiserie" is slightly pejorative in French. It usually designates curios, trinkets or knick-knacks, not necessarily from China, but imitating Chinese style. Probably the choice of this title reflects the lack of pretension that Borduas wanted to convey when competing with the great art of China.
Is there any sense in which Borduas's painting could be said to have some relationship with Chinese art? For one thing, traditional Chinese painting is figurative and not abstract. Is this the reason why the painting was titled Birches, Winter by Laing Galleries on their label on verso? But even in an abstract form, Chinoiserie has one important feature common with Chinese art. "Chinese painting," as Norman Bryson explains, "has always selected forms that permit a maximum of integrity and visibility of structure through brushwork," like foliage, bamboo, ridges of boulders, or mountain formations in the so-called "boned" style, or "forms whose lack of outline.....allows the brush to express to the full the liquidity and immediate flow of the ink," like mist, the theme of still or moving water or aerial distance, in the "boneless" style. Substitute painting knife for the brush, and oil medium for the ink, and in Borduas's Chinoiserie you will not be too far from what Bryson explained about Chinese painting. Abstract art, by groping for structure, putting form in question, giving more presence to the painterly gesture in the building of the image, was, maybe not always unconsciously, going back to the essence of Chinese painting. It is characteristic of Borduas that he could cross that road at the very moment when he was interested in "graphisme", that is to say in the graphic or linear quality of his art.
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.