Lot 20: Rodolphe (Jauran) de Repentigny 1926 - 1959

Rodolphe (Jauran) de Repentigny 1926 - 1959 Canadian oil on canvas on board Sans titre 22 x 18 1/8 inches 55.9 x 46 centimeters Provenance:Estate of the Artist Exhibited:L'Échourie, Montreal, Plasticiens, February 11 - March 2, 1955 Le Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, Plasticiens, June 24 - September 4, 2005 In the 1950s, the Plasticiens decided to propose a compelling alternative to Automatism. Influenced by Piet Mondrian's Neoplasticism and European geometric abstraction, Montreal's Plasticiens - Rodolphe de Repentigny (known as Jauran), Louis Belzile, Jean-Paul Jérôme and Fernand Toupin - wanted to liberate painting from any expressionistic heaviness and create a new spatial language and aesthetics, through their rigorous use of the pure "plastic" elements of tone, texture, form and line. Similar to Borduas's role in the Automatists, but through a different artistic approach, Jauran was truly the artist-theorician who led the Plasticien movement, having written the manifesto in 1955. The shift signalled by Jauran and the Plasticiens is considered to be the second important event in Quebec's contemporary art history which paved the way for its post-1955 artistic evolution.