Rita
Letendre
Photo credit: MNBAQ / Gallery Moos Archives
Rita Letendre
(1928–2021) was a pioneering Canadian artist of Indigenous ancestry, known for her abstract art, hard-edge paintings, and large-scale murals. She spent her career between Montreal, New York, Paris, Rome, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Her numerous exhibitions in Canada and abroad made her a key postwar artist in the country.
Photo credit: MNBAQ Archives
Rita Letendre, 1974, Untitled (RLM-019), Acrylic on cardboard, 10 x 40 in, Photo credit: Guy L'Heureux
"The explosion of colors is my rebellion in the face of sadness, death, and anguish."
Rita Letendre, Fire & Light, Art Gallery of Ontario, p.80
Photo credit: MNBAQ Archives
The estate of Rita Letendre is represented
by Galerie Simon Blais
in Montreal.
Photo credit: Rita Letendre Archives
It was through her contact with the Automatist group that she abandoned the figurative painting taught at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in favor of more spontaneous compositions. In the mid-1950s, she was one of the few women to exhibit with the Montreal group of abstract painters; by the early 1960s, she had won several awards that would ensure her recognition and propel her career.
Her career is characterized by a great consistency that led her from structured gestural abstraction (1950s–early 1960s) to hard-edge and geometric abstraction (late 1960s and 1970s), during which time she developed her favorite motif: the arrow. Then, starting in the 1980s, her work progressed toward a new oblique gestural style, in which the dramatic power of color and the dynamism of composition remained constants.
Photo credit: Tess Boudreau
Photo credit: MNBAQ archives
An artist of exemplary energy, she worked with various media and techniques, including oil, acrylic, casein, airbrush, pastel, and silkscreen.
Between 1965 and 1980, she created several outdoor murals in Canada and the United States, which earned her a solid reputation.
Of particular note are Sunforce (1965) located on the campus of California State University Long Beach; Sunrise (1971) located on an exterior wall of the Neill-Wyck College student residence in Toronto; and Joy (1977) located in the Glencairn subway station in Toronto.
Letendre's paintings can be found in numerous major public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Photo credit: John Reeves
In 2010, she received the Governor General's Award,
the highest distinction awarded to visual artists in Canada.
Photo credit: John Reeves