Nature morte à l'atelier, 1953

Painted from his Paris studio, Nature morte à l'atelier captures the quiet harmony between interior space and the life of the city. On a round table, a pedestal dish of pears and grapes stands beside a glass bottle, while the chimneyed rooftops of Montparnasse rise beyond the window. Beaulieu arranges these simple forms with a calm geometry and a refined sense of balance. His muted tones—ochres, mauves, greys and pale whites—create an atmosphere of gentle light and stillness. Blending the structural clarity of Cubism with a lyrical sensitivity to colour, he transforms everyday objects into meditations on order and solitude. The composition’s simplicity and restraint reflect his enduring search for serenity amid the rhythm of urban life.

Paul Vanier Beaulieu’s immersion in Paris began in 1938. As Germain Lefebvre observed in a tribute to the artist, Beaulieu gradually absorbed the atmosphere surrounding the great moderns—Bonnard, Dufy, Braque and Matisse. He met Rouault, Derain and, most significantly, Picasso, whose studio he was invited to visit and whose example he admired deeply. Beaulieu had arrived already nourished by the achievements of Canadian predecessors Maurice Cullen and Clarence Gagnon; combined with the influence of the Fauves and the European avant-garde, these encounters catalyzed his search for a new and personal expression across oils, watercolours and etchings.

This artistic momentum was violently interrupted in 1940 when the German occupation of Paris led to his internment, with his brother, as a British/Canadian national in the Saint-Denis camp. After four years he returned briefly to Montreal, but by 1947 the lure of Paris and his abandoned studio drew him back. His reputation rose quickly. He held two solo exhibitions, including a notable presentation at La Gentilhommière in 1949, where collectors were drawn to still lifes of pitchers, fish and fruit bowls rendered with a cubist inflection. Critics noted the echoes of Braque and Picasso, the purity of Matisse’s colour, and above all the emergence of Beaulieu’s own distinct voice.

Throughout the early 1950s he participated in leading Parisian exhibitions—the Premier salon des jeunes peintres, the Salon de Mai and the Salon de l’Art libre. A defining moment arrived in 1951 when the Musée national d’art moderne de Paris acquired Nature morte à la bouteille jaune, a rare honour for a young Canadian painter.

Though living in Paris, Beaulieu built an increasingly strong presence in Montreal. The Waldorf Gallery organized solo exhibitions in 1953 and 1954, presenting ensembles of still lifes—coffeepots, cups, grinders and other humble objects—used as vehicles for inventive formal play rather than literal description. During the 1953 Festival de Montréal, he was included in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibition Quelques peintres canadiens contemporains.

In 1954 he entered into an exclusive representation agreement with Dr. Max Stern of Montreal’s Dominion Gallery, guaranteeing a modest but steady income and enabling him to remain in France without financial strain. Stern mounted a major solo exhibition in 1957. The following year the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts paired Beaulieu with his friend Jean Dallaire in Gallery XII, and in Paris he was invited by the Musée national d’art moderne to participate in Three Canadian Painters alongside Alfred Pellan and Jean Paul Riopelle—firmly establishing him among the key Canadian modernists active abroad.

Beaulieu lived and worked quietly in France for decades, sustaining his relationship with Canadian galleries. In the 1970s and 1980s, retrospectives at the Frédéric Palardy Gallery, Bernard Desroches Gallery, and the Vincent Gallery affirmed his stature among collectors and connoisseurs. In 1994, Galerie Simon Blais presented an extensive survey of his watercolours, drawings and prints from 1950 to 1971.

Over his long career, works by Paul Vanier Beaulieu entered major public collections, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée national d’art moderne de Paris, the London Art Museum, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

For this appreciation we have referred to Germain Lefebvre ’s outstanding catalogue which accompanied the Paul Vanier Beaulieu we curated and hosted at Galerie Walter Klinkhoff in 2009.