Jean Paul Riopelle : en mouvement (1923-2002)

Introduced by Paul-Émile Borduas to the practice of creating without preconceived ideas, Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002) took part in the activities of the Automatistes, whose manifesto Refus global he signed in 1948. In 1947 he moved to Paris, where he became close to André Breton and the French Surrealists. He then joined the founding movements of lyrical abstraction, which brought him to the attention of the critic Georges Duthuit. Riopelle's art reached maturity in the early 1950s with his brilliantly chromatic paintings, the famous ‘mosaics’. Winner of the UNESCO Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1962, he adopted a personal approach in which nature and abstraction confront each other in a constant dynamic tension.

This exhaustive biography paints an intimate, well-documented portrait of the man and the artist in the form of an unprecedented chronology: photographic archives, documents and first-hand quotes, as well as the painter's key works, punctuate a life revealed to us thanks to unprecedented research.

The book looks at the Canadian artist's period, his friendships (mainly with France and Quebec), and the various art-historical movements and discourses that have shaped his work and its reception. Divided into six sections, this chronicle opens with the painter's early years and closes in 2002, the year of his death.