Jean Albert McEwen 1923 - 1999

Private Collection, Toronto

Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto, 2007, p. 177

Roald Nasgaard, Rétrospective Jean McEwen, Galerie Simon Blais, Montréal, 2004, unpaginated

This work has been viewed under UV and it is in excellent condition. Some craquelure. We would like to thank "In Restauro Conservart Inc." for examing this painting and their original notes are available upon request to Sotheby's.
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McEwen, a signatory to the Refus Global, made a major contribution to Canadian art. He was one of the first Quebec artists to stress the importance of the exploration of dynamic colour, a major focus following Automatism in Quebec. In the 1950s, McEwen painted a series of White Paintings which were influenced by works of the American artist, Sam Francis. However, McEwen increasingly stressed the body and texture of the paint and built up the surface more thickly. As Nasgaard notes:

During the summer of 1955, he began to paint directly with his hands and fingers, and from this emerged a body of work that in its way was unprecedented for Montreal ... they established the basic premises of McEwen's future work, essentials that he could vary and reinvent with unflagging freshness. McEwen had a controlled and expressive use of paint, which is quite brusque, applied in broad gestures, scraped and textured.

The large monochromatic series that followed had on its pictorial surface a vertical axis which changed in width and density producing works with reflections and refractions echoing back and forth. Nasgaard continues:

McEwen soon arrived at the endlessly fecund signature structure of his all-over surfaces, textured with variegated hues and tones, built of layer upon layer, ambiguous in depth, sometimes dense and opaque, sometimes transparent and luminous. His paintings are like the earth's crust, matter shaped by unseen geologies of folds and faults, or they glow with the light of a sunlit garden.