A Quebecois’s colourful canvases

The Quebecois artist Alfred Pellan, the centennial of whose birth is this year, evolved through many styles and movements during his long career. The exhibition Alfred Pellan: the Prints, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), presents a comprehensive narrative of this evolution in an unfortunately cramped space. Prints of many of Pellan’s earlier paintings are displayed, accompanied by a wide variety of other media such as theatre set and costume designs, greeting cards, performance art concepts, and poetry illustrations. Pellan’s use of strong and bold colours unites every phase in his development, phases which are otherwise visually disparate to the point of seeming the work of a handful of different artists.

Pellan’s work is visually striking first for its colour, then its variety. His strong use of colour is largely derived from the fauvist aesthetic of André Derrain, though rather than abandon the technique Pellan stuck to it throughout his artistic development. The exhibition features prints of his earlier paintings, many of which employ the geometric shapes and compositions of the cubist style he worked in for many years. His use of bold colours in these prints, unlike the pale shades of much cubist art, makes his work unique rather than imitative. Bestiary and Delirium Concerto, two of the series featured in the exhibition, invoke the wild mythical creatures, and nude female forms so often found in surrealist art. In these works, however, he does not use the complex and hyper-realistic palette of many surrealists, but instead sticks to his strong and simple set of reds, oranges, yellows, greens, and blues.

The most interesting prints on display, however, are not those based on paintings or strict printmaking. The exhibition features a number of works which Pellan executed as research for other projects, most notably a series of greeting cards, a piece of performance art, and set and costume design for the theatre. A series entitled “Les pères Noël,” for example, is a playful set of Christmas cards which were ultimately rejected by the company Pellan created them for. His adherence to simple shapes and a restricted set of strong colours is very effective in this series, as in the “Polychromés” prints which served as research and planning for a performance art piece. The basic geometric lines of these works are complemented by their vivid and varied colours. Pellan’s set and costume designs for two production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, finally, testify to the practicality of the print medium. The clean outlines of his costumes, their sharply defined colours and shapes, give a striking sense of movement and physicality. The strict linearity of his set designs, meanwhile, provides a contrasting minimalist backdrop for his extravagant costumes. Printmaking, then, serves Pellan’s creativity as a multi-purpose medium for increasing his areas of artistic investigation.

Initially, however, Pellan was approached by a friend and printmaker mainly interested in making prints of his paintings. That enterprise began with both pragmatic and commercial goals in mind. Prints, being so easy to reproduce, allowed wider dissemination of his works, but also meant more publishing opportunities. The medium, evidently, quickly gained creative potential for Pellan, and many of his later works were executed exclusively in print. Since his death in 1988, Pellan’s prints have become very popular with collectors of modern and Canadian art. In 2005, his wife Madeleine Pellan donated all the prints from the artist’s private collection to the MMFA, totalling over seventy works.

The exhibition itself, as a curatorial endeavour, does not do justice to the complexity and variety of Pellan’s prints. The works are all packed into a small room in the MMFA’s Canadian Art section, on the second floor of the museum’s Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavillion. The dense displays, though they accentuate the continuity of his series, make the exhibition’s one room seem daunting and overwhelming. Using more gallery space would have made Pellan’s prints easier to appreciate at a more comfortable pace, particularly the most singular works that do not fit into a series or specific project. The small and isolated gallery also undermines the importance of this exhibition. The space is hard of access, hidden in a room next to the MMFA’s generally deserted Canadian art collection, which itself is housed in the museum’s less-frequented pavilion on the North side of Sherbrooke Street. Pellan’s works, for their intricacy and evolving aesthetic properties, require a larger and more accessible exhibition space.

Note: This article was published on 8 January 2007 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.