Additional Images

Provenance:

Patrimoine Marcil, Geneva, Switzerland

Note:

Registered with Patrimoine Marcil (Estate of René Marcil) under the number AL- 61.

Accompanied by impeccable provenance, this striking oil painting by René Marcil comes directly from Patrimoine Marcil, the estate of the artist. The vibrant colours and balanced composition of the work is a prime example of Marcil’s Neoplasticism period.

Marcil’s contemporaries took note of the work produced during this period, with Kay Kritzwiser, The Globe and Mail’s art critic 1964-1980, writing “his facility with paint and his almost epicurean device in making his luminous surfaces come together without conflict.” She also noted that ‘’his glowing sensuous colours of his abstract paintings are bright, unmuddied, and they come movingly together, cleared of all inessentials.”

A painter, draughtsman, and fashion illustrator from Montréal, Marcil spent most of his professional life in New York, Paris, and London. In 1947, Marcil played a pivotal role in the successful launch of Christian Dior’s "New Look" collection in the United States. Today, his fashion drawings are in the permanent collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre, Paris.

In 1977, Marcil’s The Abstract Couple, dated 1954, entered the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Curator Elizabeth Flinn refers to this work as ‘’poetic in colour and composition’’ and subsequently, artworks by Marcil were included in a Modern Art group exhibition alongside works by Jackson Pollock and René Magritte.

Works by Marcil are present in the Collections Nationales de France, Ministère de la Culture de France, Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre, Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.