Serge Lemoyne

Serge Lemoyne was born on 13 June 1941 in Acton Vale, Quebec. He studied at the Ecole des beaux-arts de Montreal from 1958 to 1960, a period that ended when he was expelled from the school for refusing to conform to its evaluation requirements. Through the 1960s he became a central figure in Montreal's avant-garde, staging happenings and performances and showing at institutions including the Musee des beaux-arts de Montreal in 1965 and a solo exhibition at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal in 1966. In 1967 he designed the discotheque environment for the Youth Pavilion at Expo 67.

His 1972 performance and exhibition Slap Shot, staged at the artist-run gallery Vehicule Art in Montreal, is frequently cited as a key moment linking his performance practice to the hockey imagery that would define his later career. Beginning in the mid-1970s he developed the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge series, using the red, white, and blue of the Montreal Canadiens as a recurring visual language, of which Dryden (1975) is the best known example. A major retrospective, Serge Lemoyne, Une retrospective, 1960 to 1987, was organized by the Musee du Quebec (now the Musee national des beaux-arts du Quebec) in 1987 and 1988, surveying nearly three decades of his work.

Lemoyne died of cancer on 12 July 1998 at the age of 57. Most gallery and art-press sources, including Le Devoir, Radio-Canada, and several dealer biographies, place his death in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, though The Canadian Encyclopedia records Montreal as the place of death. The Musee national des beaux-arts du Quebec revisited his legacy with the 2021 to 2022 exhibition Lemoyne, Hors jeu (Offside).

Institutional and gallery sources consistently frame Lemoyne as a foundational figure in Quebec contemporary art: The Canadian Encyclopedia describes him as a pioneer of performance art in the province and, in its words, "perhaps the first Quebecois pop artist." His trajectory from 1960s happenings to the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge hockey paintings is treated by museums and dealers as a coherent evolution from performance to a signature pop vocabulary rooted in Quebec popular culture, particularly hockey and the Montreal Canadiens. The two major museum retrospectives, in 1987 to 1988 and again in 2021 to 2022, indicate sustained institutional interest in reassessing his place in Canadian art history. No verbatim critical review from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is quoted here.

Lemoyne's auction market is small and irregular, with relatively few works appearing at sale in any given year. His all-time auction record is Le masque (1975), which sold for CAD 240,000 including buyer's premium at ByDealers in Montreal on 6 November 2021, a result widely reported at the time as a record for the artist. By contrast, a more recent work, Sans titre (1976), sold for CAD 49,250 at Heffel in Toronto in 2026, a fraction of the 2021 record. The gap between these results illustrates how much a single strong sale, rather than a broad and consistent market, currently defines his auction profile.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Lemoyne, and authentication runs through his estate's dealing galleries, principally Lacerte art contemporain in collaboration with Skwirl Contemporary Fine Art Gallery, alongside Galerie Simon Blais and Galerie LeRoyer. His auction history is thin, with results ranging widely between a single high-profile record sale and much lower prices for comparable works, so collectors should treat any individual sale result with caution rather than as evidence of a broad market trend. His deep presence in major Canadian public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Musee des beaux-arts de Montreal, is the strongest evidence of his lasting institutional standing.