Riopelle in contemplation in his paris studio next to his abstract pastels and sculpture

AS STATED earlier, it was not until the end of the Second World War in 1945 that the full human values and pleasures of abstract art rose to be internationally accepted and celebrated.

There was an important reason for this, which became clarified by the end of the devastating war, and the beginning of careful analyses and evaluations of opinions and attitudes towards race, culture, and identity, which had influenced Nazi aggressions and invasions.

The original isolated human condition of all racial and cultural groups had begun to evolve into less rigid racial and group loyalties centuries before the beginning of the First and Second World Wars.

Humans all over the world had begun to learn of other races and group cultures by various processes, some far less harmful or violent than others: From simple voyages of discovery and exploration, barter and trade, to eventual violent imperial, colonial, and religious invasions.

Riopelle taking a break from working on a huge abstract panting in his Paris studio

As a result of such an eventual worldwide Western imperial mission, the colonised areas of Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Asia, Australia, etc, began to inherit orthodox European standards in the arts (except for the 17th and 18th Century European Baroque in architecture, painting, sculpture ,and music, which broke with general orthodox European standards), leaving many of their European-trained artists wearing Europe’s academic 18th and 19th Century old clothes, which, thankfully, allowed the abstract ingenuity and intelligence of African, Pre-Columbian, Asian and other non-Western art forms to remain in obscurity, to be later discovered and documented by open-minded European archeologists and anthropologists like Emile Durkheim, Franz Boas, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Sir James Frazer, who held the first chair of Social Anthropology at Liverpool University.

It has been noted that Hitler’s Nazi philosophy bore a grudge against the rest of Europe for the eclectic, cosmopolitan non-European or non-white interests, habits, products, artistic styles etc, it had picked up via its exploratory exploits in Africa, South America, Asia etc.

That, plus the freedom of Gypsies (who as a group originated in India) and Jews (who originated in the Middle East) to become nomadic residents of Europe, intermingling and even integrating with Europeans, and even rising economically and socially, had produced a mentally unbalanced resentment and inhuman response in the Nazi social agenda, which wanted to assert and maintain an inflexible or even impractical pure racial and group culture in Europe, and even across the world.

The end of the Second World War began a more educated general European understanding of the pitfalls of such Nazi reactions. This understanding extended to clarifying how such an antagonistic philosophy had been fueled by a nostalgia for the original isolation of the entire world’s group cultures.

For example, today, when we admire antique works of art from most isolated cultural groups before the 16th Century, we are admiring works of art that mostly were not addressed to any other racial or cultural group outside their own.

Yet, even today, humans remain free to create such art only for themselves, ignoring the world of others that has evolved. Similarly, others of every racial or original group culture are also free to create abstract works influenced by the human identity existing beyond their own specific racial or group culture’s heritage, and addressed to an international human identity.

Today, among those across the world who have been educated by knowledge of the achievements and art of the earth’s peoples have emerged artists who can be said to no longer exclusively represent their racial heritage or identity, but their human heritage and identity.

It was not until the 1950s that the glory of abstract painting (which will be our main focus in this essay) appeared, like an endlessly stunning cosmopolitan kaleidoscope of the human identity across the world.

It was now the individual abstract painter/artist who, like a miraculous comet or twinkling star, was given the freedom to blaze a trail towards the human identity, in humanity’s name.

It was also a precarious and brave endeavour, fraught with self-questioning, exhaustion, surprise, social opportunism, charlatanism, mediocrity, or enormous spiritual elation and sensual success.

Even when supported, the abstract painter was left alone to discover and struggle to bring back to his or her audience some value that lit up the reality of our human identity all over again.

Such abstract painting comes to represent the artist and those who accept and share the artist’s style, which goes from person to person, human to human, rather than any specific racial or cultural group.

The heroes of such painting, from the 1950s onward, came from across the globe, and often went from ‘rags to riches’ by sheer talent, commitment, and nomadic movement between the world’s internationally educated modern capitals and cities such as Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Rome, Milan, Barcelona, Brussels, Stuttgart, Munich, Zurich, Basel, Stockholm, New York, Chicago, Washington, Montreal, Toronto, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Montevideo, Cape Town, Dakar and Tokyo. Such abstract painters/artists of all races, were: Zao Wou-Ki of China; Kumi Sugai of Japan; Pierre Soulages, Jean Bazaine and Jean Dubuffet of France; Roberto Matta of Chile; Fernando de Szyzslo of Peru; Alejandro Obregon of Columbia; Wifredo Lam of Cuba; Jesus Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Alejandro Otero of Venezuela; Torres-Garcia of Uruguay; Hunderwasser of Austria; Lucio Fontana of Italy/Argentina; Frans Kratcberg and Sergio Camargo of Brazil; Skunder Boghosian of Ethiopia; Karel Appel and Corneille of Holland; Alan Davie of Scotland; Pierre Alechinsky of Belgium; Ivon Hitchens and Ben Nicholson of England; Afro Basaldella, Guiseppe Santomaso, Emilio Vedova, and Antonio Corpora of Italy; Joan Miro, Antonio Clave, and Antonio Tapies of Spain; Jules Bissier, Willi Baumeister, and Karl Otto Gotz of Germany; Jean-Paul Riopelle, William Ronald, and Jack Bush of Canada; Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline , Willem de Kooning, and Archile Gorky of America, Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling of British Guiana/Guyana; Maria Helena Viera da Silva of Portugal, Mario Prassinos of Turkey; Asger Jorn of Denmark; Jannis Spiropoulos of Greece; Tadeusz Kantor of Poland; Brett Whiteley of Australia; Maria Luisa Pacheco of Bolivia, etc.

All of these abstract painters brought something from their cultural or geographical background to their works, but most of all, they created a visual language and style which transcended the obvious limitations of their specific backgrounds.

A good example of such achievement is the late famous Canadian abstract painter, Jean-Paul Riopelle, who is, without doubt, Canada’s most renowned and successful painter, and certainly one of the greatest painters of the 20th Century.

Riopelle was born in Montreal in 1923, and by 1945 was hopping between Montreal and New York, then from New York to Paris by 1947. In Montreal, Riopelle had quickly walked away from art classes and become involved in a group of other Montreal abstract painters called ‘Les Automatists’.

Riopelle knew that his Canadian cultural background was provincial, steeped in secular French Catholicism and rigid academicism, and that he would not find the same acceptance and understanding in Canadian cities of the 1950s as he could

in New York, Paris, or Rome of that decade, where there was more cosmopolitan knowledge of artistic goals.

Yet, that did not mean that Riopelle’s abstract paintings did not remain steeped in elements of the Canadian landscape, seasons, native Indian culture, or its growing multi-cultural mosaic.

Based in Paris, Riopelle’s creative freedom found full release and quick acceptance, and his work rose steadily to international fame, receiving celebrated criticism via various magazine articles and books by perceptive critical minds.

Canada’s international image and cultural status would also benefit enormously from his innovative individuality. First of all, Riopelle’s abstract art, whether small watercolours, pastel drawings, prints, sculptures, or huge canvasses 10 by 20 feet, reveal the instinctive human identity of a man who enjoyed the Canadian outdoors; who went fishing with friends and absorbed countless aspects of the Canadian environment, including native Indian aspects, which were part of his heritage.

In Paris, he was popular and admired for his quotidian gregarious habits among ordinary people like shopkeepers, bartenders, taxi drivers, café waiters and booksellers. The success of Riopelle’s painting is based on the similarity of human energy and the progress it communicates to each viewer.

Riopelle’s influences, whether from colourful fallen leaves, tree tops veined by branches and stems, colourful rocks of the Canadian Shield — which one can see in a bus ride between Toronto and Montreal, snow, old roads, native Indian festivals, music, etc, is transformed by an abstract ritual of energetic painting.

Marcel Brion, a truly perceptive French art critic, described Riopelle’s art as being “vibrative in unison with the soul of the universe…. an instinctive art…an unconscious will to construction, a will that ends by gaining the upper hand.”

By picking up three or fours colours on a broad putty knife or mason’s trowel, and working feverishly but constructively, countless Riopelle canvasses in overall chocolate tones hint of the aphrodisiac quality of chocolate lined with milk and organic ingredients, the mosaic of owl and golden eagle feathers, etc, which lead us right back to geographic and indigenous Canadian and American influences embedded in his ultimate visual voyage and style, uniting every sensitive viewer joyously with their cosmic identity as living humans.

Riopelle’s achievement and international acceptance, despite all his daring artistic non-conformity, cast a beautiful and genuine social benevolence on those patrons everywhere, whether private collectors or international art museums and corporations, who had responded positively by throwing generous sums of money at the artist in his quest to achieve higher and higher creative heights, so that in the end, Riopelle’s staggering superhuman achievement inspires us to be the same as well.