Executed in 1951, the present work narrates the height of Canadian-born Jean Paul Riopelle's involvement in the avant-garde of post-war Paris. Known for expressive works of thick impasto and chromatic intensity, Riopelle is widely associated with Lyrical Abstraction – a movement that came out of Paris during the late 1940s concurrently alongside Abstract Expressionism in New York. Sans titre is dense with matter and kaleidoscopic pigment; thickly applied with a palette knife or directly from the tube, Riopelle's exuberant canvas celebrates the visceral quality of paint.

Painted on the reverse of an older work (circa 1947) – a characteristic wonderfully rare across the artist's practice – this painting is also notable for its impressive provenance. Once in the collects ion of the American abstract artist Shirley Jaffe, Sans titre pinpoints an important moment in the history of postwar Paris. An expatriate artist herself, Jaffe remembered this moment as “exciting, wonderful... I went to every contemporary gallery and looked at everybody’s work and gave myself a visual education… Sam Francis came around ’51 or ’52, and Joan Mitchell had already been there and would come back later, Jean Paul Riopelle was there: a Canadian artist, one of the most generous artists I have known… There was a going and coming that was vital, a cultural exchange that was very lively” (S. Jaffe, quoted in: S. Kaneda, ‘Shirley Jaffe’, Bomb: Artists in Conversation, Spring 2004, online). Importantly it was Jaffe who introduced Riopelle to fellow painter and Abstract Expressionist artist Joan Mitchell, who would become his long-term lover and intellectual partner for subsequent decades.

With its vivid gemstone accents that flicker and dance across the canvas, the present work exudes the explosive energy of this era. In the aftermath of the mass upheaval of the Second World War, Paris became an artistic melting pot, attracting creatives from across the Western world. From Jackson Pollock to Maria Helena Viera da Silva, artists flocked to the city. Here, painters and sculptors rubbed shoulders with prominent authors and musicians to bring forth one of the greatest periods of creative cross-pollination and artistic experimentation of the Twentieth Century. This period of the early 1950s, and specifically the year the present work was created, would prove critical for Riopelle. As outlined by art historian Guy Robert: “During the year 1951, Riopelle painted tableaux that were textured with thick pastes, applied with a brush and more and more often with a spatula, and these depths, already bubbling with colours, were then slashed in all directions by fine spurts of paint whose network constitutes a kind of jazz rhythm: jerky, syncopated, muscular” (G. Robert, Riopelle, chasseur d’images, Montréal 1981, p. 68). Furthermore, it was in 1951 that Michel Tapié included Riopelle in the major exhibition, Véhémences confrontées, at Galerie Nina Dausset. In this crucial group show, French and American abstractionists, from Pollock to Hans Hartung, where exhibited side by side for the very first t.mes . Indeed, it was from this momentous exhibition that the term ‘lyrical abstraction’ was born.

With the consolidation of his dynamic and kaleidoscopic artistic language, 1951 announced the zenith of Riopelle’s practice and mature style. Working with a palette knife and squeezing pigment directly from the tube onto the canvas, Riopelle’s exuberant, thickly impastoed canvases deny inhibition, celebrating the visceral quality of paint with each impasto peak. Describings Riopelle’s approach to painting, curator Jean-Louis Prat has written: “All that mattered was swiftness, being in the necessity of the action, and letting his hand, which now wielded a palette knife, express itself freely in generous swaths of paint. The gesture was no longer so much a fuite en avant or a question of fatality but an absolute necessity” (J. Prat cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, Acquavella Galleries, Riopelle: Grand Format, New York, 2009, p. 21). Sans titre offers a remarkably intricate and uniquely mesmerising example of this practice; it is as though the warmth, energy and improvisation of this period is captured in each layer of Riopelle’s thick impasto. With numerous examples housed in major museum collects ions across the globe, Riopelle’s works of the early 1950s are today considered the most significant of his celebrated career.