Montreal — Guido Molinari, an inventive abstract painter who was a dominant figure in Canadian art for more than five decades, died of complications from pneumonia early Saturday in a Montreal hospital.
Molinari taught at Concordia University for 27 years until he retired in 1997.
"He was an extraordinary artist and a very generous man," said Eric Devlin, a Montreal art gallery owner. "He enjoyed teaching and talking about art, and the construction of art just for the pleasure of it."
His philosophy about painting was simple.
Montreal abstract artist Guido Molinari is seen during an interview in Montreal in this April 13, 1987 file photo. (Robert Nadon/CP)
"There is no such thing as a colour, there are only colour harmonies," Mr. Molinari once said. "A given colour exists only in its shape and dimensions — and in its correlation with other colours."
Guido Molinari was born in Montreal on Oct. 12, 1933. His father played with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. His mother was the daughter of a craftsman who cast plaster religious statues.
Mr. Molinari began painting when he was 13. At 16, he contracted tuberculosis and while he was recovering he read the authors who would shape the existentialist approach to his art: Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus and Piaget.
Between 1948 and 1952, Mr. Molinari studied design at the Ecole des beaux arts and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He opened his own studio in 1951.
He experimented by painting blindfolded and in the dark. Initially, his work was not taken seriously.
After Mr. Molinari read a 1955 article about Jackson Pollock dripping paint onto canvas, he went to New York to hone his taste for the abstract. When he returned to Montreal, he started painting using only black and white and turned out some of the best works in his career. But he didn't make much money from them.
In 1967, Mr. Molinari won a Guggenheim fellowship.
During the 1960s, most of his paintings were multi-coloured vertical stripes but by 1970 he had abandoned the stripes in favour of modularized triangles and rectangles.
In 1976, the National Gallery in Ottawa held the first major retrospective of his work.
Mr. Molinari married Fernande Ste-Martin, a leading Quebec journalist, writer and former director of the Museé d'art contemporain, in 1958. They had two children, a son and daughter. Their daughter died four years ago.
Mr. Molinari was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 1971 and in 1980 was awarded the Prix du Quebec.
A major restrospective of his work was shown at the Museé d'art contemporain in Montreal in 1995. Since then, there have been major shows in France, Holland and Germany.
