Additional Images

Provenance:

Dominion Gallery, Montreal, QC;
Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern, Montreal, QC;
Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, NB;
Deaccessioned to benefit art purchases at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery

Note:

Paul Vanier Beaulieu is another artist under-recognized in English Canada. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, where he met Stanley Cosgrove and Jean-Paul Lemieux, then worked to save money to travel to Paris in 1938, a year after he graduated. Beaulieu soon established himself in Paris by acquiring a studio in Montparnasse, taking classes at the École des Beaux-Arts while making work. After a brief return to Canada following the Second World War, he went back to Paris and kept it as his base until his permanent return to Canada in 1973.

Beaulieu was primarily painting the figure and still life in Paris in the late 1940s and 1950s. These massive grapes embody the essence of the School of Paris post-war. Beaulieu was a participant in this milieu, no longer a student, and measured himself among a rising wave of modernists such as Nicolas de Staël. Raisins is an essay on volumes, planes of colour and space that never wavers from its connection to the perceived world, grounded in the spirit of French modernism in the post-war era.