Jean-Paul Lemieux 1904 - 1990

Guy Robert, Lemieux, Gage Publishers, University of California, California, 1978, p. 19.
Marie Carani, Jean Paul Lemieux, Musée du Québec, Québec, 1992 (French version), p. 258, no. 116, reproduced in colour.

Lemieux's deeply compelling Angoisse is an unusually impassioned work within the artist's oeuvre. Typically, whether conveying contentment or melancholy, Lemieux's body of work is characterized by a subdued sense of restraint; Angoisse, in contrast, confronts the viewer head-on with its nearly audible cry of desperation – a scream which immediately calls to mind another, world-famous expression of extreme anguish.

Lemieux's artistic output was heavily influenced by his life experiences, and his paintings often depicts scenes from childhood, taken from memory, old family photographs, or a combination of the two. The son of a travelling salesman, his early life was marked by his father's long periods away from home. As Lemieux's daughter Anne Sophie later recalled, "his own father's absence inevitably marked him, no doubt contributing to the sense of nostalgia that emanates from his somber work".

Guy Robert elaborates further:

In the fall of 1916, just as hundreds of other Quebec families were leaving for the United States in the hope of resolving their economic difficulties, Mme. Lemieux set out for California with her three children. It was a long journey: interminable days and nights, an unsettling exodus towards a strange, far-off land...the eleven year old Jean Paul's sensibilities would be profoundly affected by this journey, which was to be echoed forty, fifty, sixty years later on in canvases charged with feelings of insecurity.

Lemieux drew inspiration from Expressionist painters – Gauguin and Munch were favorites – and in Angoisse, he used flat, freely-applied planes of colour and loose brushwork to channel the immediacy of his emotion. While the cropped composition, moonlit sky, and vague, almost universal setting are classic hallmarks of the artist's style, the rawness of this scene's anguish suggests this painting was a particularly personal conduit to self-expression.

Much of Lemieux's most compelling work uses principals practiced by the Expressionist movement and, indeed, Lemieux confirms that he was drawn to the work of Edvard Munch in particular.  According to Marie Carani, Munch's "symbolic expressionism exemplifies the main influence running through Lemieux's whole career."

Carani notes that "between 1970 and 1990 Lemieux took a more particular interest in our profound metaphysical anguish" and cites this lot, entitled Angoisse and painted in 1988, as an example of the artist's ability, like Munch, "to tell the great drama of contemporary humanity."

Marie Carani, Jean Paul Lemieux, Musée du Québec, Québec, 1992, pp. 202-203.