Quebec’s Abstract Radicals

The history of Canada’s art, like that of its literature and music, is really two separate histories, that of English-speaking Canada and that of Quebec, each of which seems to exist quite comfortably without acknowledging the existence of the other. In English Canada the Group of Seven represents the defining moment in its quest for an artistic identity, and yet the group is largely unknown and under appreciated in Quebec. Quebec’s equivalent to the group—the Automatiste artists led by Paul-Émile Borduas who introduced abstraction into Canadian art in the 1940s—is celebrated in its own province not only for the artistic masterpieces its members produced, but also for the decisive social and political role they played in moving Quebec from tradition to modernity; but they are little known in English-speaking Canada. Most of us recognize a painting by Borduas or his more famous pupil Jean-Paul Riopelle, but in general the Automatistes, if known at all, are put together with...