QUEBEC CITY, CANADA.- The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec pays a glowing tribute to Jean Paul Lemieux (1904-1990), probably Québec’s most popular painter, by presenting a museum event highlighting the 100th anniversary of his birth. Both Musée buildings have been called into service to display a happy reunion of magnificent works, some shown for the first time, in an original, theme-based showing – time, night, city, plain and winter. Thanks to important loans from various institutions and individuals, the exhibition Homage to Jean Paul Lemieux features more than 50 paintings and drawings – a considerably more generous selection than initially anticipated – in galleries whose exceptional design is intended for visitors’ greatest viewing pleasure!

JEAN PAUL LEMIEUX - Born in Québec City on November 18, 1904, Jean Paul Lemieux spent most of his life in the Old Capital, where he passed away on December 7, 1990. Although his early landscapes and genre scenes were influenced by the esthetic of the Group of Seven and the art of the American Social Realist painters, in the 1950s, Lemieux defined his own world vision in works with distant horizons, portraying the immensity of our landscapes with an extraordinary economy of means. His corpus is marked by fascinating works and a style and manner that are unique among the major currents of contemporary art.

Among the masterpieces to be revisited and discovered are: The Far West (1955), The Evening Visitor (1956), The Distant City (1956), The Dog Race (1957), 1910 Remembered (1962), Death on a Clear Morning (1963), Starless Night (1964), Julie and the Universe (1965), Voyage to the end of Night (1965), Rider in the Snow (1967) and Self-portrait (1974).