Rita Letendre

Rita Letendre, LL.

D. (November 1, 1928 – November 20, 2021) was a Canadian painter, muralist, and printmaker associated with Les Automatistes and the Plasticiens.

She was an Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Governor General's Award.

Letendre was born the eldest of seven children to Anne-Marie Ledoux and Héliodore Letendre in Drummondville, Quebec.

She was of Abenaki and Québécois descent.

At age 19, while working at a restaurant in mid-town Montreal, a patron saw sketches she was working on when business became quiet and was struck by her talent.

Practically insisting that she enroll in the École des beaux-arts de Montréal (of which Letendre had never heard), he picked her up at home, took her to the school and stood at the bottom of the steps ensuring she entered, then continued to stand there long enough for her to be asked if she was enrolling – the answer was "Yes".

After several questionnaires and a practical exam, she was accepted.

It was there that she met friends Gilles Groulx and Ulysse Comtois, who was to be her partner for over 15 years.

There she worked in an academic atmosphere for a year and a half.

In 1950, she went to view an art show "L’Exposition des Rebelles" (despite being largely condemned by her professors) and befriended the show organizer Jean-Paul Mousseau – this was her introduction to the circle of Paul-Émile Borduas and Les Automatistes.

Soon thereafter, she left the École des beaux-arts de Montréal.

Paul-Émile Borduas (the main force behind the manifesto Refus Global) was probably the greatest influence to Letendre’s life as a painter – he believed self-knowledge was the key to producing highly personal work.

When she was mocked for painting figurative images, Borduas would defend her, insisting figurative painting or non-figurative painting was still painting.

In the late 1950s, having internalized the ideas of the Plasticiens, she abandoned the confines of geometric works and began studying the ideas of Zen and Confucius; these ideas began to translate into her paintings characterized by lines and strokes in black and white.

She was also struck by the work of the Abstract Expressionists in New York and in particular, impressed by the work of Franz Kline.

Many of these elements and themes would be revisited in the works that soon followed, increasing in gestural quality and characterized with heavy impasto with a palette knife or spatula.

By 1951, Letendre had abandoned figuration and become an abstract painter.

She began showing with the Automatistes in store windows and on fences in St-Louis Square in Montreal.

Her first official group show was in 1955 at the Henri Tranquille bookstore in Montreal, alongside other first and second generation Automatistes.

Eventually her work was noticed, most notably by artist/art critic Rodolphe de Repentigny (the major force behind the Plasticiens, who espoused the philosophies of Piet Mondrian and the virtues of geometric form in art).

Impressed by the structure and form in the works of the Plasticiens, Letendre began changing her style to a more geometric one, employing more structured colour fields, zones of energy, thus temporarily abandoning the purely instinctual approach of automatism.

She showed at Espace 55 with the Plasticiens – the exhibition was shown in Quebec, Montréal, Rimouski and Toronto – the same year as she had her first solo show at L’Echourie in Montreal.

Her production began to increase and Letendre began to come into her own, winning first prize in the Concours de la Jeune Peinture in 1959 and the Prix Rodolphe-de-Repentigny in 1960.

This prize (worth $300) and the additional sales that followed enabled Letendre to quit her job and paint full-time – it also allowed her to buy more paint and canvas.

In the middle and late 1960s, she simplified her work and focused on hard-edge geometric shapes and movement, developing what became known as her flèches (arrows) so that diagonal lines activated the surface of her works.

Her personal life changed too.

She travelled to Paris for three months and ended her relationship with Ulysse Comtois; by the end of the year she was in a new relationship with Kosso Eloul.

Armed with better paint, more colors and more material, she began painting larger works in explosions of violent color and won second prize in the painting category in the Concours artistiques du Québec in 1961.

Her compositions were intensely personal, more carefully planned; she began anchoring masses with carefully visualized gestures which would often take hours to visualize and execute.

Having secured a Canada Council grant in 1962, she travelled with Ulysse Comtois throughout Europe for the next year and a half.

This was a productive period and she sent large groups of works home; the beginnings of her hard edge style also began, where more well defined masses or wedges would evoke vibration, movement and collisions.

In Italy she showed at Spoleto, won a gold medal at Piccola Europa in Sassaferator, and met Russian-born sculptor Kosso Eloul.

On Eloul’s invitation to work in one of his studios, she travelled with Ulysse Comtois to paint in Israel.

When he took a teaching position at California State College at Long Beach in March 1964, Letendre went with him.

In California, two key opportunities availed her.

The first was a commission to paint Sunforce a large mural executed on a campus building.

Sunforce represents a critical turning point in her technique.

In the context of California with its Light and Space Group, her impasto work may have seemed to make little sense.

Also, due to the massive scale of the mural, her current impasto technique was impractical and she was forced to adapt to the flat plane of the mural surface.