Austria III

Jean Paul Riopelle

1954

Purchase, Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest, inv. 1963.1395

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

An abstract painting features a dynamic composition of fragmented shapes and textures. A bright, luminous area dominates the upper left, contrasting with darker, more complex forms on the right. Austria III , painted in 1954, the year of Jean Paul Riopelle’s first solo exhibition in New York, is an admirable illustration of the possibilities, both expressive and formal, of his new use of the masonry trowel. In addition, by organizing the surface around a large, central white mass, he introduced here a semblance of composition and, at the same time, an allusion to landscape painting, which is also suggested by the title. In a handwritten note in the file for this work, Evan H. Turner, who acquired it for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, recalls a conversation in which Riopelle remarked that he had been impressed by the sigh