Jean-Paul Riopelle

Jean-Paul Riopelle, (October 7, 1923 – March 12, 2002) was a Canadian painter and sculptor from Quebec. He had one of the longest and most important international careers of the sixteen signatories of the Refus Global, the 1948 manifesto that announced the Quebecois artistic community's refusal of clericalism and provincialism. He is best known for his abstract painting style, in particular his "mosaic" works of the 1950s when he famously abandoned the paintbrush, using only a palette knife to apply paint to canvas, giving his works a distinctive sculptural quality. He became the first Canadian painter since James Wilson Morrice to attain widespread international recognition. Born in Montreal, Riopelle began drawing lessons in 1933 and continued through 1938. His parents encouraged his interest in art and allowed the young Riopelle to take classes with Henri Bisson (1900–1973), who taught drawing and painting out of his home on weekends. Bisson was a well-known artist and educator in Montreal at the time and was responsible for a number of public monuments that still exist today. Riopelle studied engineering, architecture and photography at the École polytechnique de Montréal in 1941. In 1942 he enrolled at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal but shifted his studies to the less academic École du meuble, graduating in 1945. He studied under Paul-Émile Borduas in the 1940s and was a member of Les Automatistes, a group of Montreal artists who were interested in Surrealist techniques, particularly automatic drawing with its embrace of the imagination and creativity born out of the unconscious mind. Breaking with traditional conventions in 1945 after reading André Breton's Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, he began experimenting with non-objective (or non-representational) painting. He was one of the signers of the Refus global manifesto. In 1947 Riopelle moved to Paris and continued his career as an artist, where, after a brief association with the surrealists (he was the only Canadian to exhibit with them at the landmark exhibition International Exhibition of Surrealism at Galerie Maeght in 1947) and to sign Breton's manifesto the Rupture inaugurale) he capitalized on his image as a "wild Canadian".