Rita Letendre

Menace (Ramat Gan)

Rita Letendre(Abenaki and Québécois) is widely acknowledged as one of Canada’s most influential abstract artistsfrom the second half of the twentieth century. Letendre was a central member of the Automatistes and the Plasticiens, two artistic groups that formed in the 1940s-50s in Quebec that championed non-figurative painting. Menace (Ramat Gan) was created soon after she achieved enough recognition to devote herself to art full time and travel through Europe and the Mediterranean. The painting is titled after an Israeli settlement in the outskirts of Tel Aviv whose name translates as “garden height.” It foregrounds two main characteristics of Letendre’s pictorial vocabulary in the early 1960s: a dynamic color palette and highly expressive brushwork consisting of both broad swats and smaller punctuating gestures.