Midnight Sun (Quartet in White)

Jean Paul Riopelle

1977

Purchase, with a special grant from the Government of Quebec, inv. 2001.164.1-4

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

This is a four-panel abstract painting with a monochromatic palette of black, white, and grey. Each panel features a circular or radial form against a textured background. This remarkable work belongs to the "Iceberg" series, which is made up of some thirty pieces inspired by a trip to Baffin Island. Here Riopelle, a master in the use of colour, almost exclusively uses black and white. "You can be sure," he said, "that if I had gone sailing in the Mediterranean I wouldn't have come back with these paintings. But nothing is clear-cut in the Arctic. Everything's not black and white. The sky, on the other hand, seems black, truly black. If I painted a sky black like that, nobody would believe me. And what's on the ground isn't even snow, white snow, but grey ice that is also transparent." Credit: This re