Jean-Paul Riopelle Value: Top Prices Paid at Auction

Autriche III (1954) represents a pivotal moment in Riopelle's career, created in the year he represented Canada in the Venice Biennale, alongside Paul-Émile Borduas, and began his partnership with the prestigious Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. It achieved Riopelle's current auction record when it sold at Christie's Hong Kong in November 2022. The painting's most striking feature is its prominent use of white, which creeps into the composition from the side. This creates both a semblance of composition and an allusion to landscape, directly referenced in the geographical title. According to Evan H. Turner, who acquired the work for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Riopelle remarked that he had been impressed by the sight of glaciers while traveling in Austria. The sections of white evoke these slowly flowing sheets of ice, contrasting with the bright central colours. More than just an abstract work, Autriche III represents Riopelle's philosophy about abstraction and figuration; it maintains a harmony that guides the eye across the canvas, imbued with the memory of his journey to the Austrian Alps.

An untitled work from 1953 achieved this result at Christie's Paris in December 2017. This expansive canvas, measuring 2 by 3 metres, exhibits the controlled spontaneity characteristic of Riopelle's most accomplished works from this period. It features a mosaic-like arrangement of palette knife strokes predominantly in black, white, and red. In certain areas, the colours muddle together, intersecting and overlapping each other on the palette knife’s edge to create various gradients and shades of grey. This work emerged during a period of increasing contact with prominent members of the New York School and the international art scene, shortly after Riopelle acquired his first personal studio space in Paris, which he described as "the first time I've had a workshop of my own." This dedicated creative space enabled him to exhibit at the Galerie Pierre Loeb in May 1953, a show that Modernist scholar Pierre Schneider identified as "the starting point for Riopelle's Paris celebrity."

Vent Du Nord (1952/53), which translates to “North Wind,” sold at Heffel Fine Art in May 2017. This painting, when it was completed, established Riopelle as a leading artist of French Lyrical Abstraction and the École du Paris. It draws inspiration from the Canadian landscape, maintaining a connection to nature without literal representation. This dual quality is a defining characteristic of Riopelle's mature style. Art historian Mark Cheetham described the work as exemplifying "the expressive, unbridled freedom of painterly expression" that stood in opposition to the "hard-edged, geometrical tendencies" prevalent in American colour field painting and the Montreal abstractionists known as Les Plasticiens.

Another significant work from the 1950s, Forestine (1954) achieved this result at Sotheby's Paris in December 2018. This panoramic work is a grandiose painting exuding energy and vitality, staging what has been described by Sotheby’s as a “telluric battle" whose dramatic proportions are reinforced by the viewpoint offered to the viewer. Created in the same year as Autriche III (1954), Forestine is part of Riopelle's evolution toward more perceptible, while still abstract, subjects. The title suggests a connection to forests, typical of Riopelle's practice of creating abstract works that maintained connections to the natural world. Its undulating tonal values mimic a birds-eye view of a forest, bringing together the masses of contrasting colours into a deceptively unified whole.

Another significant sale at Heffel Fine Art in Vancouver, Composition #2 (1951) sold in November 2023. Created during the same year as Riopelle's participation in the groundbreaking international exhibition Véhémences Confrontées in Paris, where his work was displayed alongside American Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the painting showcases his transition from Surrealist automatism toward his distinctive personal style. The composition features splashed, dripped elements reminiscent of Pollock's action painting alongside more controlled, knife-applied strokes that would come to dominate his later work. The effect is one of rich layering. As Riopelle once explained: "When I begin a painting I always hope to complete it in a few strokes, starting with the first colours I daub down anywhere and anyhow. But it never works, so I add more, without realising it." This sale, one of the most recent on this list, reflects growing market appreciation for works that document Riopelle's pivotal artistic evolution.

La Sombreuse (1954), which carries the poetic subtitle "There is a colour walking around and people hidden in this colour," sold for £2,649,232 at Christie's Paris in December 2021. This piece’s complex arrangement of colour segments creates what artist Jean-Louis Prat called "an organic network, like a mosaic constitutes this painting whose darker colours seem to acquire an unusual autonomy." This observation points to a key aspect of Riopelle's mature style - his ability to make colours appear to possess their own agency and movement. A prime example of Riopelle’s most distilled style, La Sombreuse (1954) emerged during a pivotal moment in Riopelle's career - the same year as his first American solo exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and his representation of Canada at the Venice Biennale.

Saint-Anthon (1954), another key work from 1954, achieved this impressive result at Christie's Hong Kong in May 2023. This expansive canvas is part of Riopelle's series inspired by the Austrian Alps. What distinguishes this work is its compositional structure. Unlike many of Riopelle's all-over compositions from this period, Saint-Anthon (1954) relies on large areas of white or almost-white. This strategic use of seemingly empty space creates a sense of vastness and altitude appropriate to its alpine inspiration. It exemplifies his statement: "I don't draw from nature, I go toward nature.... To be honest, abstraction doesn't exist in painting." The painting emerges from Riopelle's relationship with American painter Joan Mitchell - and their influence on one another can be particularly seen in their mutual colour choices and sectioning of colour in works created around this time.

Self (1959) sold for nearly four times its high estimate at Heffel Fine Art in November 2023. This rare self-portrait offers a glimpse into the artist's self-perception and emotional state at the end of what many consider his most productive decade. The painting reveals traces of a face with two eyes closely set together, an angular jaw, and a hard-set mouth. However, these recognisable features are disrupted by slashes of red, yellow, and muddy brown, hiding any real representation. This violent erasure creates a powerful psychological tension in the work.

The layering technique employed in Self (1959) reflects Riopelle's continued experimentation with paint application. Unlike his mosaic works, where colour segments exist in harmony, here we see aggressive overlapping and more spontaneous mixing of paint. Art historian François-Marc Gagnon described this as "a struggle between the affirmation and the negation, the building up and the deconstruction," making Self (1959) Riopelle’s most intimate work. The psychological dimension of much of Riopelle’s work can be linked to early trauma, such as the death of his younger brother when Riopelle was seven years old.

Composition Ciérrée (1951) achieved this result at Sotheby's Paris in December 2023. The painting demonstrates Riopelle's evolving methodology in the early 1950s, as he began to depart from conventional brushwork toward more direct paint application methods. The composition features spiraling white lines that create a sense of cyclonic movement against a richly textured background of earth tones and primary colours. Unlike his later fully realised mosaic works, Composition Ciérrée (1951) is very much a transitional piece, where line and gesture remain equally important compositional elements. The title, which translates to "closed" or "enclosed" composition, suggests the structured nature of the work.

This untitled work from 1953 achieved 150% of its high estimate when it sold at Heffel Fine Art in June 2022. By 1953, Riopelle had abandoned brushes entirely, instead creating works that are half-painting, half-sculpture because of the thickness of the applied paint. What makes Riopelle’s “mosaic” technique particularly interesting is the element of chance involved. Before applying paint to canvas, Riopelle would load his palette knife with different configurations of colours straight from the tube, introducing an element of unpredictability. With every application of the knife, the precise pattern of colour would change; at first most vibrant and then becoming more blended. Riopelle’s best-known and best-loved works embody this spontaneity, which he called "hasard total" (absolute chance), while also satisfying the contemporary viewer’s desire for cohesion.