 |
Autoportrait
1928
Graphite
20 x 16 cm |
|
 |
Violon
1940
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
102 x 51 cm |
|
 |
Port de Montréal
1963
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
122 x 155 cm |
|
 |
Intérieur
studio Giunta
1979
Huile sur panneau
Oil on panel
91,5 x 81 cm |
|
|
Born in Montreal on October
2, 1911, Joseph Giunta was the son of a family of Italian
immigrants originally from Sicily. Nothing in his home
life predisposed him to an artistic career, even though
his mother did easel painting as a hobby. Giunta’s
father was a barber, and envisioned for his son the comfortable
future that all immigrants landing on North American soil
after abandoning their homeland dream of; Giunta, like
Matisse, was supposed to study medicine or law. Yet, the
appeal of artistic achievement was so strong that the
young boy decided to study in preparation for a painting
career, despite opposition from his father, himself a
poet. From the age of fourteen, Joseph intended to study
drawing.
|
So, in 1925, Giunta enrolled
in night courses at the Monument National under the guidance
of Adrien Hébert and Johnny Jonhston, who taught
Giunta drawing.
Two years later, he attended the École des Beaux
Arts de Montréal, where Maurice Félix, Charles
Maillard and Joseph Saint-Charles oversaw Giunta’s
training for three years, i.e., until 1927. There, he
met Stanley Cosgrove and was already working outside,
producing studies “on the motif”. Finally, he
did advanced studies for five more years with Dyonnet
Edmond.
EXHIBITIONS
During this final training period under masters, Giunta
was accepted into the 1931 Salon du Printemps held at
the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where he showed again
in 1934, 1937, 1940, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1957 and 1963.
Finally in 1936, he was able to present the first exhibition
of his figurative paintings at the Fine Art Department
at the Eaton’s store in Montreal, alongside landscape
painter Marc-Aurèle Fortin. From then on, Giunta
participated in many events, solo and group, including
the Canadian Hall of Fine Arts in Montreal in 1945.
In 1947, he showed landscapes at the Robert Oliver Gallery,
and 1949 saw him give another major exhibition at the
Antoine Gallery in Montreal before taking a study tour
of France and Italy, whence he brought back several paintings,
again figurative. The year of his ninth inclusion in the
Salon du Printemps of the MMFA, he presented his work
solo, at the Centre d’art du Mont-Royal and at the
Zannetin Gallery in Quebec City.
This was the same gallery where, in 1965, he first unveiled
work from his nascent abstract period, with highly gestural,
textured and rhythmic paintings. Thereafter, besides two
exhibitions at the Le Gobelet gallery and Eaton’s
Foyer des Arts, he was invited by the Government of Quebec
to show paintings in the Quebec Pavilion at the Osaka
World Fair, while the Zannetin Gallery circulated a touring
exhibition of his work. Later, during the 90s, he showed
collages and constructions at the Vieux Presbytère
de Saint-Bruno, the Gallery of the Alliance Française
in Ottawa and, finally, the Vieux-Palais in Saint-Jérôme,
among works by Ayotte, Beaulieu, Cosgrove, Fortin and
Lyman.
CRITICAL ATTENTION
Throughout Joseph Giunta’s career, the media coverage
of his exhibitions comprised many daily newspapers, some
of which no longer exist: La Presse, La Patrie, Le Petit
Journal, The Montreal Star, The Gazette, Le Devoir, Quebec
Chronicle Telegraph, Le Soleil and L’Action Catholique.
Moreover, upon his very first exhibition in 1936 at the
Fine Art Department of Eaton’s in Montreal with Marc-Aurèle
Fortin, Giunta enjoyed his first articles in the Montreal
papers, Montreal Daily Star and The Gazette, where they
extolled his variety of materials, his complexity of touch
and his excellent colour sense.
In addition to these commentaries, others appeared in
a 1946 edition of the newspaper Le Devoir which picked
up on the poetry Giunta’s paintings emoted, and on
his synthetic spirit which submitted the details to the
whole, a quality that would prove essential in his mature
works. Another reference to this quality appeared in the
same newspaper in 1949, when it was a matter “of
ordering the parts around the whole.”
In 1964, Giunta’s transition into his abstract period
was emphasized in La Patrie by Suzanne Lamer, who described
its force and ardour, and the following year, L’Action
Catholique in Quebec City elaborated on the importance
of his exhibition at Zannetin. According to that paper,
Giunta, in his “plastic poems”, had, through
materials, come to “find his true [mode of] expression”.
Claude Daigneault, in Le Soleil, went on to complete the
portrait in 1973 when he wrote that
the artist was a “constructor”, a term that,
all things considered, still proves to be
the most applicable one where Giunta is concerned.
Throughout his career, Joseph Giunta produced figurative
canvases inspired by such subjects as landscape, the studio,
still life and portraiture, even through the major periods
of abstraction and geometric construction since 1958.
Surely, such consistency may be surprising, but it found
no less justification in the artist’s creative thinking.
For, even if practicing these genres corresponded, on
one hand, to the inevitable early years and, on the other,
to certain periods of critical financial need, it primarily
drew the painter into a state of communion with the world,
which was undoubtedly necessary for fuelling his prospective
vision of pictorial material.
From this perspective, we recall certain late works of
figuration that were distinctly different from the initial
canvases, where realistic representation was subject to
the illusion of depth. In the oil paintings, Violon (1940),
Port de Montréal (1963) and, in particular, Intérieur
studio Giunta (1979), the various motifs actually reveal
themselves as pretexts for constructing a pictorial plane
that ignores the effects of depth
and clearly approaches the painter’s conceptions
of abstraction.
According to Giunta’s own testimonial, it was around
1958 that he made his first attempts at abstraction directly
inspired by the world around him. Like Leonardo da Vinci,
who advised young painters to discover forms by observing
old walls,( 1) he began to find urban textures interesting. Walking on
a sidewalk, for example, he would see spots, textures,
sinuous lines, organic and geometric marks, rather than
the figurative motif itself. In the natural aftermath
of this nascent development, he began collecting diverse
objects without predetermining how he would use them in
his paintings.
This collecting attitude, combined with his growing attraction
for the exclusive play of pictorial plane and material,
lay at the essence of the artistic personality of Joseph
Giunta, who manifested it most beautifully in constructions
from the 70s and 80s.
Hence, Giunta refused the literalness implying strict fidelity to a
subject in order to, on the contrary, submit the world’s objects
to what henceforth would prove to be the adventure by which he made his
mark: the pure desire for materials – the ones he used at a given
moment and the other ideal ones that remained to be constructed. Before
him, “the great wherefore doesn’t exist” and he
added, “I am amazed so much energy is dedicated to the
representation whereas, on the contrary, one must admire the effort
devoted to making something material. The decision accompanying a
simple line is already significant. In one or two lines, one can see a
major story. So how, then, is a landscape or a head relevant?”(2) This declaration clearly illustrated the artist’s
keen awareness in the face of the modern adventure and
certain of its major figures. Among them, Antoni Tàpies
– for whom “the struggle with material must
be added to reflexion” (3) – asserted, not unlike Pierre Soulages, that his
thinking was formulated gradually over the course of working.
One might imagine Giunta saying this.
Respectively seeking an equilibrium resulting from a dynamic
tension between person and material, Giunta also stood
among the heirs of Paul Klee. Klee’s precept, “the
work is not form but formation,” (4) reminds us that, among other things, contemporary production
characterizes the work of art as a development that is
progressively determined according to how it is advancing.
Painting, here, is the record of its own construction.
This is undoubtedly why Giunta often insisted there was
a certain type of motivating action to the work meant
to be, from the standpoint of postmodernity, the result
of a sequence of encounters which only exist a fortiori
through the person that generated them, (5) and on a unique occasion. In this vein, he said, “If
I reflect too much and think of my painting in terms of
progressive explanations and conclusion, I don’t
get anywhere.” So according to him, there is “another
person acting in you when you change a line, and that’s
a way to know oneself better”. This opinion was shared
by Matisse, (6)
and indicates another important aspect of this century’s
thinking, which Giunta entirely assimilated and effected, along with
the play of materials: the material of the artist who constructs
himself through his work. Far from the concept of the romantic genius
who considers the canvas as simply a receiving surface for the
projections of his person, the introspection accompanying the modern
adventure fosters – between the concrete painting, the painting
to come and the artist – a constant exchange, during which each
of the three partners responds to the calls of the other two towards a
common achievement. Finally, Giunta’s artistic thinking
emphasized that “the important thing for the painter is to assess
himself in action in order to reach his own truth and emotions. Thus,
the work brings him close to himself, deep down inside.” For
Giunta, making work meant creating objects of communion in which the
viewer would recover the hope of imagination – and doing this
from a most contemporary vantage point; through material, found object
and self-revelatory painting. |
