HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE
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JEAN~PAUL ARMAND MOUSSEAU AANFM AUTO CAS QMG 1927 ~ 1991
Sans titre (série Spectrum) pastel on card on board, signed and dated 1958 44 x 27 7/8 in, 111.7 x 70.8 cm P ROVENANCE : A Prominent Montreal Collection
L ITERATURE : Pierre Landry, Francine Couture and François~Marc Gagnon, Mousseau, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1997, reproduced page 106, listed page 147
E XHIBITED : Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Mousseau, January 24 ~ April 27, 1997, catalogue #158 Jean~Paul Mousseau was the youngest member of the Automatists. He came from a working~class background and, restricted by finances, his works in his early years were small and executed in gouache, watercolour and ink. He championed the creation of public, non~figurative art in Montreal in the 1950s, and his commissioned ceramic piece 54 Circles, created for the Montreal Metro in 1966, was a ground~breaking public work. Mousseau worked in many media, including those with three~dimensional possibilities such as fibre, ceramic, glass, jewellery, theatre design and costumes, and was especially interested in new media such as fibreglass and resin, in which he found the possibilities for expressive light and colour very exciting. His interest in the effects of light within his works led to experimentation with pastels in a series of works exploring colour and line, wherein the concentrated pigments of pastels, being suspended in oil, convey colour in a distinct, luminous way.
E STIMATE : $20,000 ~ 30,000 22