Rita Letendre. *Aforim*, 1975. Acrylic on canvas, 137.2 x 198.1 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Anonymous Gift, 1975.

We were overcome with sadness to hear of Rita Letendre’s passing, and we remember this great Canadian artist with warmth and admiration. Rita lived a decorated life of 93 years, one that will continue to influence the course of Canadian culture. Her legacy is a balance of both hardship and revelation, artistic genius and resilience that left a significant mark on art history.

The last time I encountered her work was at the Art Gallery of Ontario, during her solo exhibition in 2017. To me, Rita’s fame and accolades were well-deserved for the most obvious reasons. Each canvas portrayed an enigmatic quality that can only be found in the best of abstract paintings. I remember hungrily taking in the sharp focuses and swathes of hues as my eyes moved from focal points to unrendered shadows.

Yet whilst her art spoke for itself, Rita as a person, through her lived experiences, was equally dynamic and interesting. In 1975, in the January issue of Maclean’s, Rita wrote about her winding journey that led her to be an internationally collected and widely recognised artist. She wrote about the difficulty of gaining any small success as a woman during a time when women weren’t regarded as capable, and the words from critics that would often reinforce these stereotypes.

As an Abenaki and Quebecois child from a low-income household, Rita’s formative years were marked with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and the usual trials of adolescence multiplied for being an ethnic minority on her father’s side. She studied at l’École des Beaux-arts de Montréal after a patron at the restaurant where she worked insisted that she apply. There, she honed her skills with the plan to become a designer in order to make a stable income. But it wasn’t until she met sculptor Ulysses Comtois, who brought her to meet Paul-Émile Borduas, that her relation to art changed.

Borduas was the leader of Les Automatistes, an artist group active in Montreal throughout the 1940s and 50s. They were unconventional and delightfully avant-garde, embracing abstraction in its myriad forms. Rita was immediately drawn in, and the course of her practice changed for good:

“Suddenly painting no longer had to be figurative. It was colors and shapes and energy exploding in a great expanse of space. I didn’t give a damn if the rest of the world thought it was garbage. So we’d live on spaghetti and beans till people caught on. Money became meaningless; I was going to become a painter, a damn good painter.”

She speaks about how Borduas was one of the most influential people for her art. She quotes him as saying, “as an artist you must learn who you are, what life means to you and only then can you relate your findings to the rest of the universe.”

Amongst this avant-garde group of artists, Rita found where she belonged, and she began painting in an entirely new light. Still, it would be many years before her first successful show, which is why she and her cohorts all worked jobs beyond their artistic endeavours.

“But at least, in those days, I didn’t have to fight as a woman. We were all too busy supporting each other emotionally and financially to get bogged down with problems of sex roles. We were protest painters exploring a new language. Only the critics, when they bothered with us at all, had time for such absurdities — she paints like a man.”

Critics can be unkind, and in the mid-50s they didn’t take to the abstract works produced by Les Automatistes like their predecessors of later decades. The artists were even called communists on occasion, an accusation that anyone familiar with art history might smile wryly at, for it was the government-funded American artists who first brought abstraction to the fore as a righteous expression of freedom in a cultural Cold War.

Rita Letendre. *Tabori*, 1976. Acrylic on canvas, 86.5 x 122 cm. Gift of Marie A. Dunseith, 1983. © 2017 Art Gallery of Ontario.

Rita speaks most vividly about being a woman during the decades when all the odds counted against her. “Picasso progressed, through his blue period to his rose period and beyond; he changed as an artist and people accepted this,” she said, of how artists who were men were regarded. “But when I, as a woman, go beyond hard edge to the increased energy I find in soft haze, I am immediately classified as more feminine or happily married or sexually satisfied.”

Even after reaching some semblance of success, the hesitancy for gallerists to put investment behind a woman artist meant she had to endure constant rebuff when she tried to make it on the international stage. But despite her identity counting against her, Rita has gone on to enjoy tremendous success, accumulating domestic honours of the highest order along the way. She paved the road during a time of hostility towards women professionals, pioneering the steps so that women artists today are regarded based on merit, as are their male counterparts. The status quo has changed greatly since Rita’s heyday, but her legacy lives on so that we may remember what it took to get to where we are today, thanks to women like her who fought against the odds and overcame countless hardships to be able to paint their truth.

You can read the full 1975 article written by Rita Letendre from Maclean’s online.

Rita Letendre: A Life Remembered