Rita Letendre 1928 - 2021

Canadian Artist, Muralist, Printmaker

Quebec-born Rita Letendre was the eldest of seven children born of Abenaki and Québécois parents. At the age of 19, while working in a Montreal restaurant, she was doing sketches when the restaurant wasn’t busy. A patron was so impressed with her work that he encouraged her to go to art school.

She attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal in 1948. Here she became associated with the avant-garde art milieu of Montreal and was introduced to Surrealist, Automatiste and Abstract art.

Rita was first associated with the Automatistes; a group founded in the 1940s by Paul Émile Borduas. She then moved towards the more orderly geometric style of Guido Molinari and the work of the Plasticiens. By the early 1950’s she was exhibiting small abstract gouaches (and not making a lot of money and living on canned goods). Eventually she was producing larger paintings with violent colour, and that’s when her luck changed.

She won first prize in the Concours de la Jeune Peinture in 1959 and the Prix Rodolphe-de-Repentigny in 1960. In 1962, she received a Canada Council grant and travelled throughout Europe for the next year and a half with her first husband Ulysse Comtois. While in Spoleto, Italy, where she had an exhibit, she met Russian-born sculptor Kosso Eloul. After accepting an invitation to paint in one of his studios, she and Comtois travelled to Israel.

In the late 60’s her work was yet again evolving, and her personal life changed. She spent three months in Paris and ended her relationship with Comtois. After beginning a new relationship with Kosso Eloul (who subsequently became her second husband), they moved to California. There, she was commissioned to paint SURFACE, a large mural on a campus building at California State College at Long Beach.

In 1970, Rita and Kosso settled in Toronto (they live on Sherbourne Street, south of Gerrard) and spent time in New York where there was a huge demand for her work. Galleries couldn’t get enough of her paintings.

Torontonians were astonished and in awe of her large mural works at Ryerson University and the Royal Bank Plaza. Her participation in public art at the time was unparalleled.

She had major retrospectives at the National Gallery of Canada in 2017 and at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 2019, as well as 60 solo shows. For more than fifty years her work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally.

She has said that her work is grounded in metaphors of light, darkness and movement in an ongoing commitment to the process of discovery of self.

Rita Letendre is without question one of Canada’s most important and renowned artists. She has produced spectacular works of art.

2002 Order of Quebec
2005 Officer of the Order of Canada
2010 Recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts
2012 Queen Elizabeth 11 Diamond Jubilee Medal