Untitled

In October 1953, Marcelle Ferron left Montreal for Paris with her three daughters. During her first years abroad, “Ferron took multiple trips, travelling to the Balkans, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands where she discovered new qualities of light” (translation ours). Her stay in France, until 1965, played a decisive role in the development of her career. A batch of pigments donated to her by a patron during the last half of the 1950s is at the origin of a transition in her pictorial aesthetic. The year 1958 began with the exhibition New Talents in Europe, presented at the University of Alabama Art Gallery, in the US, followed by an exhibition in late March of recent paintings at the Galerie Denyse Delrue, who, along with the Galerie Agnès Lefort, became true allies in maintaining the artist’s visibility in Quebec. In August, Ferron participated in an exhibition organized by l’Association des artistes non figuratifs de Montréal (the Non‑Figurative Artists’ Association of Montreal), at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Later that fall, Ferron, Borduas, and Riopelle were featured in the exhibition Canadians Painting in Europe, presented at the Jordan Gallery in Toronto.