Sold for: $31,250

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Acquired from the above and by descent to the present Prominent Montreal Estate, 1964

In 1926, when Alfred Pellan was just 20, he received a Quebec government scholarship which sent him to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. There, he was exposed to the vibrant avant-garde that made up the contemporary art scene there, familiarizing himself with Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism and those movements’ bold use of colour and form. While this work is decidedly representational for Pellan, depicting a still life of cups, fruit, playing cards, and a pipe, the arrangement nevertheless seems to suggest the influence of the artists that he would have been exposed to during his time in Paris, and anticipates the more overtly surrealist aesthetic that would come to define his later production.

The still life is arranged on a broad field of pink wood and a background of mottled blue-blacks, with the subjects arranged in the top third of the work, nestled against the crook where the floor meets the wall. A drifting bundle of cloth serves as a backdrop, the fruit hastily arranged and floating above it. The composition is loose and airy, yet the picture feels strangely compressed, as if the space of the painting has been flattened out. The oblique angles of the work - the radiating orange and whites of the floorboards, the hard shadows of an unseen lightsource - further add to the unreal or amplified quality of the scene.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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