Alex Simeon Janvier

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

Alex Janvier is one of the many Indigenous artists of his generation who went through Canada’s Indian residential school system, undermining cultural continuance and sovereignty as it forced assimilation. At the age of eight, he entered Blue Quills residential school near St. Paul, Alberta, approximately 100 kilometres from where he was born on the Denesuliné reserve of Le Goff, Cold Lake First Nations. Despite being impacted by colonial government policies, Janvier gained national renown for his vibrant abstract art from the 1960s. By 1973, when he painted Just Married Politicians, Janvier had developed his distinctive style. From the late 1970s into the 1980s and onwards, Janvier even shaped the actual canvases into a circular form. Often referred to as the first Indigenous modernist artist in Canada, he was able to consolidate a modernist aesthetic while transmuting an Indigenous cosmology: "beatific icons of Plains Indianness, derived from the traumatic visual culture of residential school, and biomorphic abstraction, informed by Dene material culture and the Bauhaus pursuit of a universal language of abstraction." As with many of Janvier’s works from 1966 to 1977, Just Married Politicians was signed along with his treaty identification number 287. During this time, he often signed his work to include the number or signed only with the number, a practice in protest against what was done to him by the federal government. In 1966, the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) commissioned works for an exhibition in Ottawa. Janvier was prolific, producing 80 paintings, 38 of which were sold by DIA. The others, the department appropriated. The way Janvier stylized the numeral 7 in his treaty number was to reference "a family symbol, inscribed by his father on trees." As Greg A. Hill notes in his curatorial essay for the National Gallery of Canada’s 2016 retrospective of Janvier’s work, "[t]he mark thus has a direct link to the Land and the artist’s memory of experience there." This painting was completed a few years after the international exposure Janvier and other First Nations artists had at Expo 67, the world’s fair in Montreal. For the biography on Dr. Luigi Rossi in PDF format, please click here.