Œuvres d'art

Laval-des-Rapides is testimony that Fortin was already well on his way to being a leader of modernism in Quebec. It is a vibrant composition painted with a characteristically bold palette lyrically capturing a compelling view of the rural village of Laval-des-Rapides in Quebec’s Laurentians. With structural solidity and under dramatic skies, Fortin sets a large, rustic house with its skirted green roof in the foreground, a broad porch and chimney described with confident brushstrokes. Beside it rises the church, its slender steeple anchoring the composition and pointing upward into a sky filled with Fortin’s turbulent and voluminous, cloud formations. Creating a sense of rural life, people animate the scene. 

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“By the end of the 1920s, Fortin was well on his way to becoming one of the artists instrumental in setting the markers of modernism in the arts as it was taking shape in Quebec” [1], Professor Esther Trépanier, of the Department of Art History at University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM), wrote in 2006. Assisted in her research by Mme. Kathleen Vézina, a doctoral student at UQAM, Professor Trépanier provided important original research in an essay to accompany a fine collection of M.A. Fortin artwork we exhibited at our original family art gallery, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff. Etude (Laval-des-Rapides) is testimony to the lyricism in his composition and his strength of colour. 

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Footnote: 

[1] Esther Trépanier & Kathleen Vézina. Marc-Aurèle Fortin as Seen by His Contemporaries, in Alan Klinkhoff Gallery Inc., Marc-Aurèle Fortin Retrospective Exhibition (Montreal: Alan Klinkhoff Gallery Inc., 2006), 2