Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle

Two painters walk into a bar. A few days later, smitten, one shows up at the other’s door with an armful of the best canvas that money can buy— and the rest, as they say, is history. The exhibition “Mitchell/ Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation,” organized by the Museé National des Beaux-arts du Quebec in cooperation with the Art Gallery of Ontario, provocatively invites viewers to consider the effect upon their paintings of the couple in question’s famously stormy, ensuing 25-year relationship, a dramatic and often quite fraught interaction that, curator Michel Martin proposes, was fundamental to the developing art of both. The show includes over 60 works presented in pairs and groupings whose installation highlights significant moments in their shared and then increasingly separate lives, from 1955 to 1979. (Mitchell died in 1992; Riopelle, 10 years later.)

The exhibition’s first gallery helpfully invites viewers to consider these two artists before their fateful meeting in 1955. The New York-based Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) was rapidly gaining attention as a second-generation abstract expressionist for paintings such as Untitled, 1951, a lyrical composition that makes no secret of her love of de Kooning’s work. Fierce, ambitious and direct, Mitchell was raised in a wealthy Chicago family who immersed her in art, poetry (her mother was a poet) and sports. Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923– 2002)—devilishly handsome and playful—came from a middle-class Quebeçois family, and since 1948 had been living the dream in Paris, enjoying a wildly successful career. Riopelle’s marvellous Chevreuse II, 1953–54 (included, as a coda to the AGO version), shows why. Wet paint, knifed into narrow shards of prismatic colour, tumbles kaleidoscopically across the massive canvas to dizzying effect, evoking, for me anyway, the ecstatic remains of a shattered stained-glass window. Breaking with the Catholic church and smashing artistic conventions had indeed been central to the Refus Global, a 1948 Montreal artists’ manifesto, signed by Riopelle just before his departure for Paris, that, in the tradition of surrealism and automatisme, had called for an art of direct, “automatic” and unpremeditated action as a way of tapping into the subconscious.

Walking into the second room, titled “The Encounter and Its Consequences,” I was struck by how these two very different artists initially seem to appear almost as one, their works dissolving into each other. Mitchell adopts Riopelle’s thicker paint and all-over compositions and tries out the horizontal format. Riopelle, for his part, puts down his spatula—temporarily— and experiments with gestural, arcing brushwork. “These gouache paintings … resemble your paintings, my love,” he gushed in a love letter at the time. “I have become your model student.” But the similarity was just skin deep: where her marks are revised, erased, scraped and carefully reworked across many weeks, his are dashed one atop the other in explosive, single sessions.

Elsewhere in the same room a pairing of large horizontal canvases brings these distinctions into focus. In Mitchell’s Piano mécanique, 1958, trestles of colour quiver like a game of pick-up sticks mid-quake. Every part hangs in the balance, and closer study confirms that not a single mark, not even the white ground, has been left to chance. In contrast, Riopelle’s Landing, 1958, churns with the energy of real-time action. White slashes shimmer, birch-like, against black-blue paint shored up by lush woodsy greens, greys and browns. He tills the paint like furrowing the earth. “When I hesitate, I do not paint. When I paint, I do not hesitate.” (Mitchell, upon hearing this declaration, was said to have rolled her eyes.)

A subsequent pairing of triptychs, in the next section, hints at differences that were becoming more pronounced during the eight years that they shared a studio on the Rue Frémicourt in Paris. Riopelle’s Large Triptych, 1964, is symmetrical, frontal, heraldic, almost tapestry- like. Its side panels suggest a landscape in plan-view—large purpley-grey shapes, like flattened lakes, appear veritably excavated with trowel and paint. The centre panel is a smeary wonder of pastel hues, through which I could almost make out the line drawing of a horse. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds; since 1961 recognizable imagery had been playing a greater, if often awkward, role in Riopelle’s work. In contrast, Mitchell’s paintings are never anchored in any sort of figurative representation. They draw their force instead from her memories or feelings regarding a particular landscape. In her triptych Girolata, for example (named for the cliffs off Sicily where she and Riopelle had sailed), large shaggy lozenges of violet-tinged greys and sunny greens float across three canvases, coalescing in different configurations on each panel, as if being recollected anew each fresh time. They echo and sing to each other like a round robin or fugue.

The dissonance between the two painters grows louder in the next section: they move to separate studios—and, over time, separate continents, too. In 1967 Mitchell purchased her personal paradise: La Tour, a house and studio with extravagant gardens at Vertheuil, near Paris. Riopelle painted nearby at Saint-Cyr-en-Arthies but spent longer and longer periods back in Canada. His work takes an increasingly literal turn. Even the experimental Micmac, 1975, a monumental diptych made by pressing an initial painting, peanutbutter-and-jelly-style, upon a second blank canvas and then resolving the two into a single work, for all its brio and paint (so much paint), remains more mirror than reflection.

Next to Micmac hangs A Garden for Audrey, 1970, Joan Mitchell’s moving tribute to the memory of her close friend, Audrey Hess. The diptych is almost impossible to put into words. A mush of hot violet and lavender, big gobs of shiny white paint. A ghost of pale green. A spike of pale white like an apparition extends the full height of the join. A violet-stained cavity, surrounded by bursts of gerbera orange. Scumbles of goldenrod edging lilac washes. Writing about these paintings is like describing a garden or (even better) a play—the colours are at once the characters and the means by which the piece is realized.

I can’t figure out how she does it. It’s as though she breathes in landscape and breathes out paint.

In this, the penultimate room of the show, I felt ricocheted between increasingly antithetical religions. While both Mitchell and Riopelle are rooted in landscape, she approaches it through her feeling for place—she had an eidetic memory and a synesthete’s gift for colour. Riopelle’s landscapes, in contrast, begin to look more like massive woodblock prints—rendered in paint thick as a door—as in the monumental diptych, La Ligne d’eau, 1977. In addition, where they both sought to give form to realms beyond words, she could translate such worlds directly with her paint; for his part, Riopelle, with growing frequency, was turning to the borrowed symbolic power of Indigenous cultural forms in canvases like Hommage à Grey Owl, 1970, and his experimental lithographs and acrylic paintings named for Inuit string games. Finally, although they both use a white ground, one seemed to exude it as surface while the other simply exhaled it as space. In Riopelle’s surprisingly spare Iceberg No. 5, 1977, for example, white gesso provides the unmodulated ground against which delicate scrapings of ochre, blue, iron oxide and black carve out a high horizon. In Mitchell’s Untitled diptych, 1992, the white ground, by virtue of judiciously placed white marks and washes, becomes a space to hold two thick scribbles of midnight blue that, like saplings, stagger backwards from each other on stems of delicate aquamarine, with stray tendrils from each reverting, meeting, improbably, at the join.

Jackson Pollock once said that you can’t escape yourself: “Every good artist paints what he is.” Joan Mitchell described herself as “a chaos of color held together by stretchers.” Riopelle’s paintings were once approvingly characterized by his friend, the surrealist André Breton, as the “art of a master trapper.” The exhibition tracks two artists, ambitious, passionate and fierce, as they become more themselves in the increasingly unbearable company of the other.

As I walked through the show I couldn’t help but wonder why Mitchell seemed to get stronger with each passing decade, whereas Riopelle did not. He seems to have peaked around 1954, whereas she went on from strength to strength. I have a theory about this. In 1958 the American artist Allan Kaprow argued in a famous essay on Pollock’s legacy that the logical outcome of surrealism and action painting was not in painting, but in action itself. Pollock had broken with almost every conceivable pictorial tradition: space, composition, balance, colour. Action without paint was where the action would be. Perhaps the thin fuel of surrealism and action painting was no longer enough to sustain a long career, and Riopelle managed to get as much mileage from it as he could. But Mitchell was never a surrealist, and it may be possible that as a woman she faced enough challenges breaking into the tradition of painting itself to have no interest in dismantling it. Instead, she roars ahead, infused by a heady mixture of paint and feeling, confident in the capacity of paint and colour to create fresh new worlds. Wordsworth famously defined poetry as the storms of emotion recollected in tranquility. Riopelle gives us the storms, acted out within the contours of the canvas. But if it’s recollection and tranquility—not to mention respite—you are wanting, instead seek out the company of one of Mitchell’s canvases. ❚

“Mitchell/Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation” was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, from February 18 to May 6, 2018.

Monica Tap is a Toronto-based artist and a professor in the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Guelph.