Lot 121: CHRISTIAN MARCEL BARBEAU B.1925

CHRISTIAN MARCEL BARBEAU B.1925 BRISE D'AUTOMNE signed, titled and dated '75 by the artist in ink on the stretcher and titled on a gallery label on the reverse oil on canvas 81.3 by 101.0 cm. 32 by 39 ¾ in.

Roald Nasgaard and Ray Ellenwood, The Automatiste Revolution, Markham, 2009, p. 34

Dominion Gallery, Montreal

Private Collection, Toronto

Barbeau was one of the youngest of the Automatistes who finally laid to rest the last vestiges of figure and landscape art, creating instead works of overall abstract compositional unities.

The technique Barbeau used in painting this colourful canvas is evocative of the "dripping" technique he used in the mid 1940's. Nasgaard notes:

Essentially, the skeis of paint have been poured haphazardly over a variegated ground with no attention to framing the edges, the whole being like a fragment of a larger thing.

Fellow Automatiste artist, Jean-Paul Mousseau, credits Barbeau with discovering a "dripping technique" that anticipated or at least paralleled the American artist Jackson Pollock's "dripping style". Barbeau, however, did not develop it into a full fledged method of painting.