Background

Lemieux was born in Quebec, Canada, on November 18, 1904, into a well-to-do family. His father, Joseph Flavien, was a Greenshields Ltd. agent, a large supplier of wholesale merchandise, and was often away on business. Lemieux and his siblings, Marguerite and Henri, were raised by their mother, Corinne Blouin.

The children grew up with all of the privileges of the wealthy English- and French-speaking communities in Quebec city. They spent their winters in the city, but from May to November the family stayed at the Kent House hotel (now the Manoir Montmorency), a summer resort about twelve kilometres outside the city. Lemieux looked back on his early childhood as the "age of perfect happiness."

Education

Jean Lemieux was only ten years old when he met an American artist who was painting at the Kent House for the restoration of one of the hotel lodges. "His name was Parnell," Lemieux recalled later. "I got into the habit of going to watch him work, and I saw him paint some very big canvases. I was fascinated. That was when I began to make sketches." Inspired by a visiting artist and the spectacular Montmorency Falls by their summer abode, Lemieux painted his first watercolour in 1914.

In 1916 he left Quebec City with his mother and siblings and they moved to Berkeley, California, because of Marguerite's, his sister's, health issues, the girl suffered from chronic rheumatism. In Berkeley, Jean and Henri Lemieux continued their schooling in English, and the family went on trips to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Jean Paul had a chance to visit movie studios in Hollywood and, as a result, he acquired a strong interest in cinema.

The family moved back to Montreal in 1917, where Jean Lemieux attended College Mont-Saint-Louis and then Loyola College (today Loyola High School). During this period he also took lessons in watercolours. In 1925, Lemieux became an apprentice in the studio of Marc-Aurele de Foy Suzor-Cote, a respected Canadian Impressionist painter. The studio was located in the home of sculptor Alfred Laliberté. Several other artists had studio spaces there as well, including Robert Pilot, Maurice Cullen, and Edwin Holgate, painters who earned a living from their art, exhibited regularly, and were part of the Arts Club of Montreal.

In 1926 Lemieux enrolled in the École des beaux-arts de Montréal (now part of Université du Québec à Montréal) in order to become a professional painter. However, he had his own thoughts about painting and only one of his professors, Edwin Holgate, one of the best draftsmen in Montreal, made a lasting impact on the young artist. Both Holgate, who taught engraving, and Lemieux were particularly interested in illustration. Holgate's influence can be seen in the careful attention to architectural detail in the illustrations Lemieux created for two novels, La pension Leblanc by Robert Choquette (1927) and Le manoir hanté by Régis Roy (1928).

At the École, Jean Lemieux got acquainted with Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean-Charles Faucher, and Louis Muhlstock, and also established long-lasting friendships with the painters Francesco Iacurto, Jean Palardy, and Jori Smith, and the poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau.

After his graduation in 1929, when the world economy crashed and the Great Depression began, Lemieux and his mother went to Paris for a year, where he studied illustration and life drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Colarossi. In Paris, he met fellow French-Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon.

In 1931 Lemieux returned to his studies at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, graduating from it in 1934. He often spent his evenings in the studio sessions that Edwin Holgate offered to his students and friends who wanted to practise the art of drawing the nude model. Among the attendants were Borduas, Stanley Cosgrove, Saint-Denys Garneau, and Jori Smith. In addition, Lemieux met Goodridge Roberts there, a Canadian painter known for his landscape paintings and unassuming still lifes and interiors.

Career

At the beginning of his career, Lemieux along with his friends Jean Palardy and Jori Smith set up a commercial and advertising art company in Montreal, which they called JANSS, an acronym based on the names of the three artists. However, because of the economic crisis, the company was closed in six months. In 1931 Lemieux began to display his works at the annual Spring Exhibition held by the Art Association of Montreal.

In 1934 Jean Lemieux was hired as an assistant teacher of drawing and design at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal (now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal). In 1935 he began his frequent participation in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. The same year, he joined the staff of École du meuble (Furniture School), which included Maurice Gagnon, professor of art history, and Marcel Parizeau, an architect. They opened Lemieux’s eyes to the great modernist painters of the School of Paris.

During his years in Montreal, the artist created mostly landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes. His artworks were influenced by the landscape aesthetic of the Group of Seven and by the regionalist principles of American Social Realism; for instance, from Paul Cézanne he assimilated a rigorous approach, and from Paul Gauguin the use of symbolism.

He moved to Quebec City in 1937 and taught at the École des beaux-arts de Québec until his retirement in 1965. At the Montmorency Gallery in Quebec City in 1938, he and Madeleine Des Rosiers, his wife, had a joint exhibition, which was favourably received by the critics, and the Musée de la province de Québec (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec) bought one painting from each painter. After this show, La Presse described Lemieux as "the most impressive painter of the younger generation."

Along with teaching and painting, Jean Lemieux also worked as an art critic from 1935 until 1945. He wrote for such magazine and newspapers as Maritime Art, Regards, Le Jour, and Canadian Art. Writing gave Lemieux a broader public voice to share his support of "the transition to modernity in art, the necessity of openness to contemporary European and North American trends and the democratization of art."

Although Lemieux was the first to remark on abstraction in the French-Canadian press, the artist did not devotedly embrace the practice of abstraction, which he viewed as "a degeneration of Cubism, combining colour for the sake of colour with form for the sake of form, with no care for the subject that was treated." Indeed, throughout his long career as a painter, Jean Lemieux would never turn to abstraction.

By the mid-1940s, Jean Lemieux had rejected the direction of Canadian painting which was "moving farther away from the figurative." He was creating paintings that were more narrative than ever; they satirized urban and rural life. He borrowed his ideas for works from the Italian primitives and from naïve art. So, the period from 1940 to 1946 became known as his primitivist period.

Several of his large compositions mixing religious and secular content included The Disciples of Emmaus [Les disciples d’Emmaüs], 1940; Lazarus [Lazare], 1941; and Corpus Christi, Quebec City [Fête-Dieu à Québec], 1944. Despite his nonconformist style at that time, Lemieux was considered "an artist in the first rank of young Canadian painters." His work was included in a UNESCO show, with paintings from 25 other countries, taking Jean Lemieux to an international level as an artist.

Lemieux supported the preservation of Quebec culture and in the social-realist vein of the time, Jean Lemieux publicly criticized the English bourgeois. However, he became afraid of appearing reactionary, and as a result, from 1947 to 1951 the artist practically ceased to paint, only producing rare studio artworks and some oil landscape paintings. His studio paintings often comprised of humorous scenes and compositions reflecting Lemieux’s search for a simpler pictorial language.

Jean Lemieux's return in 1951 marked a new stage in his artistic career. His more classic and formal landscapes with haunting and rigid figures were further developed during his sabbatical in France from 1954 to 1955, which was supported by a grant from the Royal Society of Canada. This European visit resulted in a major change in his pictorial language. "I was absolutely lost in France," he said later. "Everything I tried to paint in Paris looked like Monet or Bonnard. In the south of France, it was Matisse or Cézanne. When I got back to Canada I began to paint in a completely different manner."

The Far West (Le Far West), 1955, was viewed as a prelude to his classic period, which lasted from 1956 to 1970. It was characterized by a horizontal format, bare subject matter, and simplified pictorial space. The "synthetist" art of the Nabis, inspired by Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne, formed the basis of his brand-new aesthetic identity.

With this breakthrough in Lemieux's oeuvre, which reflected his profound identification with the North, the artist started to reach a new and much larger audience. Lemieux's reputation in Canada and internationally grew significantly between 1958 and 1965 with one-man exhibitions in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, and Quebec City, participation in biennial exhibitions organized by the National Gallery of Canada and in exhibitions at the Bienal of São Paulo, the Pittsburgh International Exposition, the Brussels International Exposition, and the Venice Biennale. His paintings were also included in shows of Canadian painting in Warsaw, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Tate Gallery in London, as well as at the Musée Galliera in Paris.

In 1965 Jean Lemieux retired from his teaching position at the École des beaux-arts de Québec to focus solely on painting. In 1967 the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts organized a retrospective of his works, which later toured to the Musée du Québec (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec) and the National Gallery of Canada. The same year, he was commissioned to create a mural in the Charlottetown Confederation Centre.

Soon Lemieux decided to return to illustration with Gabrielle Roy’s, La Petite Poule D’eau (1971), Louis Hémon’s, Maria Chapdelaine (1981), and in 1985, Canada-Canada, a collection of writings by prominent Canadian authors. In 1974, The Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs held an exhibition of Jean Lemieux’s paintings in Moscow, Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Prague and Paris.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a dark transformation occurred with Lemieux’s artworks. Eventually, his paintings became largely ignored by the public and the critics. Although the paintings were shown in Quebec City, Montreal, and Trois-Rivières, they did not sell. In 1977 he painted the official portrait of the then Governor General of Canada, Jules Léger, and his wife. Two years later he caused a turmoil after his highly informal portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In 1985, Jean Lemieux published his limited-edition bilingual collection of prints, one for each province and territory, under the title Canada-Canada.

Achievements

• 

  Jean Paul Lemieux was one of the foremost painters of the twentieth century. Among his most distinguished artworks were the following: Québec, vue de l'île d'Orléans, Young Lady with Hat, Les masques, Le champ de trèfles, Le Cheval Blanc, Nu sur fond bleu, Marine, etc.
  
  Jean Lemieux received several awards for his works. In 1934 Lemieux won the William Brymner Prize, an award for artists under the age of thirty, for his work House at Éboulements (Maison aux Éboulements), that was lost.
  
  He became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1968. The artist was granted the Louis-Philippe Hébert prize in 1971 and the Molson Prize for the Canada Council for the Arts in 1974. In 1997 he was posthumously made a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec.
  
  A set of postage stamps depicting three paintings by Jean Lemieux, including Self-portrait (1974), June Wedding (1972) and Summer (1959) were issued by Canada Post on October 22, 2004. The stamps were released on the same day that a retrospective of his work took place; it was organized to recognize the centenary of the artist's birth and opened at the National Gallery of Canada. In addition, a retrospective of his artworks from 1956 to 1979 was held at the Gallery Valentin in 2009.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Le Parasol

  • Marine

  • Warwick

  • Portrait

  • Le Pré

  • Julie et l'univers

  • La Conversation

  • Les champs blancs

  • Les masques

  • Été

  • L’Orpheline

  • Québec, vue de l'île d'Orléans

  • Traverse d'hiver

  • Port-au-Persil

  • Le champ de trèfles

  • Montréal il y a longtemps

  • Le Cheval Blanc

  • Young Man

  • Evening Visitor

  • Young Lady with Hat

  • La noce de juin

  • Les Ursulines

  • Untitled (River View)

  • Jeune fille, l'hiver

  • Nu sur fond bleu

  • L'Apôtre

  • La femme au chapeau blanc

  • Jeune fille au chandail rouge

  • La récréation

  • Rue de village

  • Route 15

  • Petit Nu

Views

Jean Paul Lemieux was known to be a champion of modernity. He reacted against the moral rigidity and self-righteousness of his time. In addition, he protested the glorification of rural life promoted by the conservative ideology of the Duplessis era.

Quotations: "I paint because I like to paint. I have no theories. In my landscapes and my characters I try to express the solitude we all have to live with, and in each painting, the inner world of my memories. My external surroundings only interest me because they allow me to paint my inner world."

"I paint because I like to paint. I have no theories."

"I have never believed that you can show someone how to paint. You can teach the rudiments, the techniques, the tricks of the trade, but you can’t teach painting."

"Art is like a labyrinth. One must search long and ardently for the passage that leads to the light."

Personality

Lemieux always loved to repeat Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's famous remark: "I’ll put a sign on the door of my studio: 'Here we teach drawing, and create painters.'"

Interests

• Artists

  Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Edwin Holgate

Connections

Jean Paul Lemieux married artist Madeleine Des Rosiers in June 1937. They met at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, where they both studied. Later the couple had a joint exhibition which was a huge success. Nevertheless, Madeleine Des Rosiers gave up painting to devote herself to her husband's career. Their only child, Anne Sophie, was born in 1945.

Father:

Joseph Flavien

Mother:

Corinne Blouin

Spouse:

Madeleine Des Rosiers

Sister:

Marguerite

Brother:

Henri

Daughter:

Anne Sophie Lemieux

References

• Jean Paul Lemieux: His Canada Book by the Canadian Museum of Civilization Mercury.
  1999
• Lemieux Book by Guy Robert.
  1978
• Jean Paul Lemieux
  1992