Art Frame: MMFA 2019: Jean McEwen

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

MMFA 2019: Jean McEwen

UNTAMED COLOUR - PAINTURES BARBARES
CELEBRATING JEAN McEWEN

September 17, 2019 – February 2, 2020

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is paying homage to a Montreal painter Jean McEwen (1923-1999), commemorating the 20th anniversary of his death. The Museum presents a selection of his works acquired mainly over the last two decades. The great number and the significance of these works, donated by the artist's family and also several local collectors, attest to the special connection between McEwen and the MMFA.

The exhibition, installed in a newly renovated gallery in the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, presents about 20 pieces, paintings, and works on paper from 1951 to 1998. They provide an overview and a summary of McEwen's unique artistic approach: an exploration of the pictorial surface through the application of successive layers of paint, thus intensifying the expressiveness of colour within a confined space. He explored the potential of colour to create the illusion of space and surface dynamics. Playing with the duality between colour and structure, he organized his colour fields with great spatial precision while exploring the full potential of colour and the space/plane dynamics.

Some of the paintings on display highlight international exhibitions dedicated to the artist, which extended as far as Brazil, Japan, USA and England. They include Long Plumb Line No. 2 (1961) that won him a solo exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1963, and Open Mauve (1962) that features a central band intersecting two colour fields, a composition that became the artist's signature.

The exhibition also showcases McEwen's monumental masterpiece Jubilant Red (1963), on loan from the Power Corporation of Canada Collection. Also included are watercolours from the series "De ma main à la couleur" [Hand to Colour]. Gifted to the MMFA by the artist's wife Indra, which additionally feature McEwen's poems. There is also a recently restored Untitled (1951), a painting that shows Paul-Émile Borduas' influence on McEwen's practice.

About the Artist

Jean McEwen (1923-1999) was a self-taught painter born in Montreal. He exhibited his works for the first time in 1949, at the MMFA's 66th Annual Spring Exhibition. His early development was shaped by a meeting a fellow Quebec painter Paul-Émile Borduas, as well as a trip to Paris in 1951 where he met Jean-Paul Riopelle and was introduced to prominent avant-garde painters, including most significantly Sam Francis. His return to the Montreal scene coincided with a crucial moment in the history of abstract painting: in 1955, he was part of the Espace 55 exhibition at the MMFA as well as the first collective exhibition of the Galerie actuelle. McEwen subsequently joined the Association des artistes non figuratifs de Montréal (AANFM).

His bold paintings engaged with the Paris and New York avant-garde, which led to a solo exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1963. That same year McEwen was invited to represent Canada at the 7th São Paulo Biennial. His work captured the attention of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as of Joseph Hirshhorn, both of whom acquired works for their respective institutions.

In 1987-1988, the MMFA hosted the first major retrospective dedicated to the artist: Jean McEwen: Colour in Depth. Paintings and Works on Paper, 1951-1986. In 2005, MMFA held the Jean McEwen "From my Hand into Colour" exhibition that included a series of watercolours by the same name.

The watercolor works on display will be rotated during the duration of the exhibition to show to the public more of McEwans' works on paper.