Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto

Exhibited:

Marcel Barbeau: Dessins 1957-1961, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, 1977.

Note:

Ninon Gauthier notes that on occasion when Marcel Barbeau had forgotten the title of a work, which happened not infrequently for historical works, he would provide it with another. This work is titled on a label on the backing as Suite Marine but is also known as Matière Forme, the title by which it appears in the catalogue raisonné.
 
According to Dr. Gauthier: “Marcel Barbeau produced 16 small India inks in the summer 1957, just before he left Montreal for the West coast where he spent a year in Vancouver. 12 were strictly gestural and 4 tachistes.“
 
Dr. Gauthier writes that these inks, like this one, present “a formal structure, and the rhythmic pattern that it evokes will be repeated in several of the drawings from 1958 to 1960 and then in several paintings from 1962 to 1963. If the image is reversed at 90 degrees, they even announce by far the pattern of irregular parallel undulations of the first optical paintings of Marcel Barbeau, of 1964.”

Many critics consider this period to be pivotal as it “announces the end of (Barbeau’s) early gestural and tachiste automatist period” preceding a period of minimalism and optical art which followed in the early and mid-Sixties.

This work is included in the artist’s catalogue raisonné (as Matière Forme PE249).