CANADIAN POST~WAR & CONTEMPORARY ART - Heffel

HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 25
15 JEAN~PHILIPPE
DALLAIRE
QMG 1916 ~ 1965
Seraphine
oil on canvas, signed, titled and
dated 1957 and on verso signed,
titled, dated April 1957 and inscribed
Ville St~Laurent, P.Q., Canada
34 x 26 in, 86.3 x 66 cm
PROVENANCE:
Waddington Galleries, Montreal
Private Collection, Toronto
LITERATURE:
Marie~Claude Corbeil, Kate Helwig and Claude
Belleau, “A New Look at the Work of Jean
Dallaire”, CCI Newsletter, No. 25, May 2000,
page 1
EXHIBITED:
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
Their Humour: Jean Dallaire, Paintings;
Louis Archambault, Ceramics,
November 19 ~ December 3, 1959
Jean~Philippe Dallaire’s life was one of
misfortune and he is often referred to as le
peintre maudit (the accursed painter). After
spending four years in a Nazi internment camp
during World War II, Dallaire, once back in
Canada, was plagued by alcoholism and
depression. After losing a teaching position at
l’École des beaux~arts in 1952, he took a job
with the National Film Board as an illustrator.
Eventually, he moved to France in 1959 and
spent his remaining years painting in seclusion.
Dallaire’s genius and creativity were fuelled by
his ghosts, and in his melancholy he created a
powerful body of work brimming with anxieties
and contradictions. This 1957 portrait,
Seraphine, exhibits an intimate encounter
with abstraction ~ a departure from the
draftsman~inspired paintings created during
Dallaire’s years at the Film Board. The curious
stare of the sitter is framed by trembling waves
of nervous energy with rapid, expressive scrapes of paint convulsing fretful yellows into purple.
The naivety of the fragile figure set against the vibrating background is a testament to the boundless
vision of Dallaire’s rhetorical universe.
ESTIMATE: $15,000 ~ 20,000
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