1. Jean-Paul Riopelle 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.
25 Facts About Jean-Paul Riopelle
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Jean-Paul Riopelle 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.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle became the first Canadian painter since James Wilson Morrice to attain widespread international recognition and high praise, both during his career and after his death.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle was a leading artist of French Lyrical Abstraction.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle's parents encouraged his interest in art and allowed the young Riopelle to take classes with Henri Bisson, who taught drawing and painting out of his home on weekends.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle studied engineering, architecture and photography at the Ecole polytechnique de Montreal in 1941.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle studied under Paul-Emile 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.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle was one of the signers of the Refus global manifesto.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle married Francoise Lesperance in 1946; the couple had two daughters but separated in 1953.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle's 1992 painting Hommage a Rosa Luxemburg is Riopelle's tribute to Mitchell, who died that year, and is regarded as a high point of his later work.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle's oil painting technique allowed him to paint thick layers, producing peaks and troughs as copious amounts of paint were applied to the surface of the canvas.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle received an Honorable Mention at the 1952 Sao Paulo Art Biennial.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle was the sole artist representing Canada at the 1962 Venice Biennale in an exhibit curated by Charles Comfort.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle received an Honorable Mention at the Guggenheim Museum's Guggenheim International Award exhibition in 1958 and a major retrospective of his work was held at the Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne.
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Subsequent retrospectives of Jean-Paul Riopelle's work were held at the National Gallery of Canada in 1963, a smaller exhibition at the Musee du Quebec in 1967, at the Fondation Maeght in 1971, and at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1972.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle discovered the glacial landscapes of the Far North, inspiring in the black and white Icebergs series of 1977 and 1978.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle's painting Hommage a Rosa Luxemburg, done after her death, is a tribute to love and to life, to the American painter Joan Mitchell who was his companion for 25 years and is a narrative sequence of 30 tableaux, integrated into a triptych measuring more than 40 meters in length.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle lived his last years at Isle-aux-Grues, an isolated island situated in the St Lawrence River.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle was arguably one of the most important Canadian artists of the 20th century, establishing his reputation in the burgeoning postwar art scene of Paris, where his entourage included Andre Breton, Sam Francis and Samuel Beckett.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle produced over six thousand works during the course of his lifetime.
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On May 24,2017, Jean-Paul Riopelle's painting Vent du nord sold at the Heffel Fine Art Auction House spring auction for $7,438,750, the second-highest price to date for a Canadian work of art.
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Jean-Paul Riopelle was specially recognized by UNESCO for his work.
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In 2000 Jean-Paul Riopelle was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
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In 2020, his indigenously inspired paintings were gathered in the travelling exhibition Jean-Paul Riopelle: The Call of Northern Landscapes and Indigenous Cultures by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.