Additional Images

Provenance:

Patrimoine Marcil
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

René Marcil is a painter and fashion illustrator from Québec. He spent most of his professional life in New York, Paris, London and the French Riviera. After the war, his role was central to the successful launch of Christian Dior's New Look collection in the United States. Olivier Gabet, Director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris at the Louvre, wrote in 2018 that "Marcil's drawings - expressive and refined sketches - enable one to appreciate the dissemination of fashion trends in the media and the history of fashion illustration style.”

Le Delarge notes that Marcil moved to Paris which “introduced him to a taste for neoplasticism, for which he used bright colors.” The Galerie l’Art Français in Montreal described his work from this period as “intense, luminous and has the quality of combining graphic design, great draftsmanship, extraordinary color, fascinating surfaces…[and] poetic feeling."

Marcil’s contemporaries took note, with Kay Kritzwiser, The Globe and Mail’s art critic from 1964-1980, writing that “he communicates the pleasure he discovers in putting down his ideas, his facility with paint and his almost epicurean device in making his luminous surfaces come together without conflict.” She also noted that his colours are “bright, unmuddied, and they come movingly together, cleared of all inessentials.”

As echoed in the following excerpt from Cornette de Saint-Cyr, Paris, Art Contemporain catalogue of 2012, “the subject, form and flamboyant colors, Marcil's work represents an artistic language totally in tune with the new generation's aspirations of his time. This language was meant as a challenge to his peers...In the hybrid repertoire so typical of Marcil, a common thread is his casual painting style inspired by the daily life that it unmasks.”

Later, while living in the French Riviera and Paris, Marcil evolved towards Neo-Expressionism. In 1986, he wrote: "if I am talking to you about Dubuffet, Combas and Haring, it is because my work has been oriented in this direction for a long time... A contemporary artist does not paint a picture for aesthetic reasons or for the sake of beauty if you prefer. Dubuffet was the first to place social thought above the artistic work and the latter only serves to define his thought…even here in France, left-wing and right-wing politicians rejected his work, and his only supporters were writers and intellectuals. Fortunately, in Paris, there are always men (and women) who can express themselves freely because freedom of expression is something the French will never give up.”

Works by Marcil are present in the permanent collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris at the Louvre, Paris and in the Collections Nationales de France, Ministère de la Culture de France.

Waddington’s thanks the Patrimoine Marcil for contributing the above essay.