The National Gallery’s Riopelle retrospective is as much an homage to the artist as an argument for his relevance

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At the height of last year’s exaggerated scare about a political purge at the National Gallery of Canada, Bloc Québécois MP Martin Champoux rose in the House of Commons to make an odd allegation. Things had become so bad at the gallery, he said, that no one thought it necessary to celebrate the centenary of Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, considered by the administration to be an “old white man artist.”

When he died at 78 in 2002, Riopelle was an old white man. That much is fact. Whether the centenary of his birth necessitates national recognition is a matter of debate. A year’s worth of cross-country activity spearheaded by the Riopelle Foundation has left some in the Quebec cultural community scratching their heads, since there were major Quebec shows devoted to his work in both 2017 and 2021. In English Canada, one might point out that the centenary of the Group of Seven in 2020 received somewhat less attention.

The Riopelle retrospective that the National Gallery unveiled this week was on the books long before the controversy, and the gallery’s administration has now changed hands, but one could speculate the show was always an exercise in duty. Whatever the background, the circumstances leave guest curator Sylvie Lacerte with two obvious jobs: One is to convince Riopelle boosters that the gallery is paying sufficient homage, and the other is to convince skeptics that the artist is still relevant, for all his deadness, whiteness and maleness.

She aces the first task; the second is a more mixed success.

First, Lacerte provides a chronological survey of Riopelle’s work beginning with his first few vibrant abstract paintings executed under the influence of the Automatiste group in Montreal in the 1940s. The exhibit then reveals the triumphant “all-over” mosaic paintings that made his reputation in France in the 1950s, tracks the gradual emergence of foreground and background in the 1960s, and finally charts his move to increasingly representational content in the 1970s and 1980s. The show also includes 10 of his bronze sculptures from the early 1970s.

Second, to argue for his contemporary relevance, Lacerte includes works by other artists, most of them living Canadians, to make comparisons that range from the intriguing to the tangential. Hence the show’s title, Riopelle: Crossroads in Time.

Riopelle, the most internationally acclaimed Canadian artist of his generation, achieved that fame through the mosaic paintings executed after his move to Paris in 1946. These are the distinctive abstract canvases where busy, multicoloured tracks worked up by the palette knife fairly seethe with energy.

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This exhibition features works borrowed from both public and private collections including Fifteen Horsepower Citroën, a 1952 evocation of joyful speed loaned by mining investor and philanthropist Pierre Lassonde. Standing in front of such painterly bravado one can only think: lucky Lassonde.

Here it hangs near Tribute to the Water Lilies – Pavane, the National Gallery’s best and biggest Riopelle. A huge triptych from 1954, it was inspired by Claude Monet’s famed Water Lilies triptych (now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) and effectively translates the softer Impressionist energy into the more aggressive language of abstraction. Dynamic compositions such as these are classics of abstract expressionism; they require no defence and little explanation.

Yet as distinct foreground shapes set against backgrounds began to emerge in more palette-knife paintings, and the fifties give way to the complexities of the sixties, Riopelle became a somewhat reluctant abstractionist and relentless experimenter with styles and media, for good or for ill.

Like a recent survey devoted to Riopelle’s interest in the North at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2021, the later work shown here is less impressive. Riopelle makes forays into semi-representational landscape, combines the patterns of Inuit string games into large abstractions or fashions rough bronze sculptures of owls, where the many depressions of his fingerprints in the original wax create a lumpy effect in metal.

(To be fair, Riopelle’s late work must make a stronger impression at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts in Quebec City, where his 40-metre-long, 30-panel mural Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg is beautifully installed. It features painted, spray-painted and stenciled images of cranes, geese, flowers, ferns and studio debris, an outpouring of symbols occasioned by the death of his former lover, the expat American painter Joan Mitchell, in 1992. The Ottawa show includes two related panels executed after the main piece that give some idea of its style.)

However, as we move into the 1970s and 1980s, Lacerte piles on the work by other artists. One of these is merely humorous: Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf pays homage to Riopelle’s mosaic style and love of hockey with a big collage of hockey cards. Some are wonderfully subtle: Lacerte juxtaposes two small aerial views of mountains Riopelle executed in the mid-1960s, while he was recovering from a bad ski accident, with a much larger painting, Study on Vulnerability, by the Haitian-Canadian artist Manuel Mathieu, an abstract piece that hints at a fragile body.

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Other additions may simply bemuse the viewer. Why is Brian Jungen’s whale skeleton made of white plastic stacking chairs hanging in the middle of a Riopelle retrospective? The answer sits nearby: In the 1970s, Riopelle created work inspired by the ancient Thule people (ancestors of the Inuit) and their use of whale bone to create shelters. But the link feels forced partly because Jungen’s piece overwhelms Riopelle’s small works on paper.

Among the contemporary comparisons that do prove suitably thought-provoking, Lacerte juxtaposes some of Riopelle’s late seventies iceberg paintings with a “painting” by Montreal artist Caroline Monnet in which she mounted vertical strips of house wrap – that membrane often left exposed on half-finished buildings – in a large frame, turning her white panel into a reference to the housing crisis in Indigenous communities. Here are two distinctly different approaches to the idea of the North: One, created by a white man who loved to hunt and fish in northern Quebec and also visited the Arctic, is romantic, expressionistic and landscape-based; the other, by a much younger female artist of French and Algonquin heritage, is social and political.

And there is the difference between modernism and the current moment writ large. Perhaps, appreciating both Riopelle’s painterly icebergs and Monnet’s clever use of symbolically charged construction materials, we can just sit with that difference and accept modernism’s aesthetic project with its macho cast of characters and sometimes naive belief in their unharnessed creative freedom.

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The show ends with Marc Séguin’s pencil drawing of the dying Riopelle’s head, a tiny face both ancient and waning, created by an artist shocked by the impending demise of his mentor. But it’s an earlier portrait of Riopelle that seems to capture what we must accept if we are to appreciate the heights of his art. Photographer Yousuf Karsh posed him in 1965 in a Parisian attic, surrounded by strategically positioned examples of his work, the light from a high window falling on his strong profile and big head, his solid body in a moment of repose, the perpetual cigarette halfway to his lips. It is an unironic image of the male master, an out-of-date figure to be sure, but also the creator of those classic abstract paintings that ensure his legacy.

Riopelle: Crossroads in Time continues at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa to April 7.