Weaving Modernist Art

With Weaving Modernist Art: The Life and Work of Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, author Anne Newlands returns one of Canada's most accomplished and respected visual artists to the public eye.

Born into a large French-Canadian family in 1926, Mariette Rousseau embraced her passion for the creative arts at an early age. She studied art and weaving at l'École des beaux-arts in Quebec City and then worked at the California studio of groundbreaking American textile designer Dorothy Liebes. Back in Canada after an art-inspired trip to Europe, she and her husband, artist and ceramist Claude Vermette, joined the growing movement of young French-Canadian artists in their rejection of the conservatism of Maurice Duplessis' mid-century Quebec.

By the early 1960s, Rousseau-Vermette had forged collaborations with fellow artists, designers and architects with like ideas about public art. Over the next 40 years, she scaled the heights of her profession, weaving hundreds of radiant large-scale tapestries that complemented the cool interiors of modern architecture. She exhibited all over the world and earned prestigious commissions from the private and public sectors, including the Kennedy Center. Yet three years after Rousseau-Vermette's death in 2006, Newlands discovered there wasn't a single book that told her story as a pioneer of modernist tapestry and one of Canada's most prolific and influential artist-weavers. And most of her major theatre works are lost.

For Newlands, writing a book about Rousseau-Vermette became an abiding passion. Through access to the artist-weaver's archive, wide-ranging research and interviews with family, colleagues and friends, the author has created a vivid introduction to a remarkable artist who paved the way for the generation of Canadian textile artists that followed.