I visited Quebec City in January of 2025. My partner and I wanted to spend a day at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec. Prior to our excursion, I planned which exhibits to hit. I visited the website a bunch and we discussed which ones we wanted to prioritize. At the time, the main exhibit was an amazing display of Helen McNicoll’s life work. She was a significant figure in Canadian Impressionism, and the exhibition followed her life through her art in a chronological way. I had laid out the plan for our day, but upon arrival, my partner picked up the pamphlet and read it attentively, he told me that there is a tribute to Rosa Luxemburg somewhere. Apparently, I had skipped the exhibit hidden in the basement of the museum. It was difficult to know if we were headed in the right direction, no one was around. “We should give up and just go back to the main floor!” I said before our eyes landed on this massive piece of art. It had to be cut up and displayed strategically because the entire work is more than ten meters long. We both take a closer look, the artist is Jean Paul Riopelle. 


Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002) was a fundamental Quebecois artist and sculptor.His work Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg was completed in 1992. He began this work after learning of the death of his good friend and ex-partner Joan Mitchell, another pivotal American artist of the era. Despite Mitchell marrying Barney Rosset, an American publisher, she and Riopelle had a complicated romantic and artistic partnership in France for 25 years. Mitchell passed away in 1992 and in that same year, Riopelle got to work. His ten meters long installation is actually 30 different paintings joined together. Riopelle’s inspiration for the title is the fact that he used to call Mitchell his “Rosa Malheur,” which is an ironic pun using two important historical figures; Rosa Bonheur and Rosa Luxemburg.

Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) was a French realist artist known for her depictions of animals, the technical term being the animalier style. I personally studied her for her famous cow painting; Ploughing in the Nivernais, 1849.

Inherently, due to her lifestyle, she was quite the political person but her artworks do not reflect her politics at all. It was reported that she lived with a woman her entire life, smoked in public, went out to cafés and even wore pants! Bonheur’s own person and her being a woman artist in an artistic field dominated by her male contemporaries such as John Constable, makes her a remarkable figure. The main theme in most of her paintings are animals in agricultural settings, simply labouring the land. She studied animal anatomy and was very familiar with cows. There seems to be no hidden message behind a work like Ploughing in the Nivernais, she really just showcases the labouring cows for who they are, which is very aligned with the French realism movement she was a part of.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), on the other hand, was a very different historical figure. Known for her published works on humanitarian marxist theory which praised international socialism, she was a Polish-born German revolutionary who helped found the Polish Social Democratic Party and the Spartacus League which later evolved into the Communist Party of Germany. At two years old, a hip disease was wrongly treated as tuberculosis, resulting in a life-long disability of walking with a limp. She studied law and political economy, receiving a doctorate in 1898. She was a contemporary of many other marxist thinkers of the time such as Vladimir Lenin and consistently rejected his idea of national self-determination, and advocated for a more international stance for a socialist revolution. She lived during the Russian Revolution and that clearly had a major impact on her. Bonheur was arrested many times on account of “provoking violence,” "participating in the Russian revolution,” “insulting a monarch,” and “inciting anti-war disobedience.” She wrote her most famous book titled Social Reform or Revolution? in 1898, therefore solidifying her legacy as one of the few women marxist revolutionaries in history. She was assassinated in 1919 by a right-wing paramilitary group and thrown into a river.

As mentioned, Riopelle nicknamed Mitchell “Rosa Malheur.” Both these women lived tumultuous and vivid lives in their own respect. One being an alleged queer woman artist, pioneering a significant artistic movement, and the other, a disabled revolutionary who faced many political challenges yet managed to rise above it all and published great works. Mitchell’s life was also full of events. Born in Chicago, she grew up artful; music, painting, literature, museums, poetry, she was exposed to it all! She settled in New York and came back many times throughout her four decade long career. She was a pioneer in the young abstract expressionist movement. In 1959, she settled in a town right outside Paris, and her work reflected the artistic developments of both the American and French traditions. Her main inspirations include Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Vincent van Gogh. She was the first female American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Musee d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1982. Just two years later, she was diagnosed with cancer. Her battle lasted 8 years, until her death in 1992. There is now a Joan Mitchell Foundation who has programs to support up-and-coming artists.

When she died, Riopelle fueled his mourning into Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg. This was a monumental work but it only took him three months to complete. While he was known to use a pellet knife, he opted for spray paint for this work, a medium that he used toward the end of his career. His technique was quite intricate; he would place real objects such as dead geese, horseshoes, real-life cutouts, radiator fans, tools, bolts, nails and screws on the canvas and spray paint over them, leaving a silhouette or trace of them. This highlights the absence of the items, mimicking the process of grief, reconciling the fact that a loved one is no longer present in one’s life. The first thing I noticed when observing this work are the birds. They vary in shape and prominence on the canvas, but they are a constant motif. This draws from Luxemburg’s notes during her time in prison from 1915 to 1918. She became a birdwatcher and often wrote about the different birds she could observe from within the confines of prison. Note too that the cover art for her book Social Reform or Revolution? are two hands tied by rope that mimic the wings of a bird.

Her prison notes were also full of secret hidden messaging, clouded by her allegorical writing. Riopelle took after this and hid many life experiences he lived with Michtell in the painting, most of which are unconfirmed.

Upon the first exhibition of Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, Riopelle is quoted saying, “Today, there is no longer any Rosa Malheur. There is not even a Rosa Bonehur anymore. All the Rosas are dead.