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 groups who flourished in English Canada a decade after them, such as Painters Eleven and the Regina Five, as part of the larger category of abstract painting.

This situation is finally changing, thanks to a magnificent exhibition of Automatiste works (which include not just painting but dance, literature and theatre as well) at the Varley Art Gallery in Markham, Ontario. The sumptuously illustrated book/catalogue that accompanies the exhibition is co-written by two eminently qualified experts on the Automatistes: art historian and curator Roald Nasgaard, the author of the critically acclaimed Abstract Painting in Canada, and Ray Ellenwood, the author of Égrégore: The Montreal Automatist Movement, the first comprehensive survey of the Automatiste movement to appear in either English or French, and translator of several written works by the group’s members. The catalogue is as complete and penetrating an account of the Automatiste movement and its creations as any of the numerous French-language books that have been written about them.

If the Automatistes are often referred to as a movement and not just a group of artists, it is because their art—like that of the Surrealists who were a major influence on them—was inseparable from ideas and from a passionate desire for social change. Like the Surrealists, they would eventually publish a manifesto: the radical and stirring Refus global (Total Refusal), which was released in 400 mimeographed copies in August 1948, attracting the ire of church and state authorities and leading to Borduas being fired from his teaching job in Montreal. Apart from Borduas, who was the main author of the manifesto, the other 15 signatories were, on average, about 20 years old. Since 1941, they had been meeting at Borduas’s house on Tuesday evenings to look at each other’s paintings and talk about ideas, reading Freud, Marx and the Surrealist writers such as André Breton and Pierre Mabille and listening to modern music ranging from Stravinsky to jazz, blues and voodoo rhythms. After the stultifying curriculum of the Montreal art schools where several of them were students, they were exhilarated by the possibility of a “living art” that would break with the “academic” art shown in the galleries and taught in the schools. The borders of the group were porous (Pierre Trudeau would drop in on occasion, for example), and the fact that what is now known as the Automatistes consisted of those who ended up signing the manifesto in 1948 is an indication of how important that manifesto would eventually become in Quebec’s political and cultural history.

What the manifesto was about, and what the artistic works of the group illustrated, was the possibility of an art so radical, so challenging, so much a spontaneous expression of the artist’s deepest self, that it would have a transformative effect on each spectator and thus eventually on the whole social fabric. Today abstract paintings are as familiar to most of us as the academic art the Automatistes rejected and have even become a staple of corporate boardrooms, and it is hard to imagine the unsettling effect these works must have had on a Quebec public still confined by a conservative Catholic view of the world. A number of Riopelle’s breakthrough paintings of 1946 and 1947 were actually destroyed by his mother, who referred to his work as “la peinture du diable.”

Nasgaard’s essay describes the origins of this art, from the Surrealist “automatic writing” experiments of the 1920s (which sought to unlock the unconscious and to free the artist from the rational and logical impulses that blocked access to true creativity) to Borduas’s discovery of that same spontaneous creativity in the art of the children he was teaching in the 1930s. Nasgaard’s analysis of the evolution of the group’s painting—from the Surrealist-inspired dream landscapes they were producing in the early 1940s (already far more abstract or non-figurative than the paintings of the Surrealists themselves) to the paintings of the late 1940s, where the distinction between figure and ground has disappeared—is simply breathtaking, as are the many colour reproductions of paintings by Borduas, Riopelle, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Marcel Barbeau, Jean-Paul Mousseau and Marcelle Ferron that accompany it. He reminds us that the members of the group never used the word “abstract” to describe their work, believing on the contrary (to quote Borduas’s beautiful formulation) that “the painter’s song is a vibration imprinted on matter by human sensibility. Through it, matter is made to live. Therein lies the source of all mystery in a work of art: that inert matter can be brought to life.”

Clearly Automatisme was a philosophical, moral and political view of the world as well as an esthetic movement, a radical approach to art and to life based on spontaneity, authenticity and provocation. According to Nasgaard, no other art group in Canadian history has such a philosophical and far-reaching foundation.

Even more dramatically, Nasgaard claims, the Automatistes were “the first Canadians to seize the flow of the lifestream of modern art, to divert it from Europe and through Montreal, and consequently to put themselves at the centre of historical developments rather than on the periphery.” In New York at the same time, young painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning were following an uncannily similar trajectory from Surrealism to abstraction, in their case under the direct influence of European artists who spent all or part of the war years in exile in the United States. It is a typically Canadian irony that it was the work of these New York painters, the abstract expressionists, that influenced the English-Canadian painters who embraced abstraction in the 1950s, while the work of the Montreal group remained largely unacknowledged by them. Except for Riopelle, who moved to Paris in 1947 and made his reputation there, the Automatistes never attained even a fraction of the recognition enjoyed by their American counterparts. Nasgaard suggests that one reason for this (in addition to the obvious explanation of America’s economic and cultural power) is that, largely for financial reasons, most of their paintings are relatively small.

The members of the group were not all painters, however, and the impact of Automatiste works on Quebec literature, theatre and especially dance has been immense. It is in these non-pictorial areas that the collaborative spirit that animated the group is most evident, as Ellenwood’s essay demonstrates. Thérèse Renaud’s collection of poems Les Sables du rêve (The Sands of Dream), published in 1946 in a slim volume illustrated by playful Surrealist-inspired ink drawings by Jean-Paul Mousseau, is now considered the first example of Surrealist poetry in Quebec literature. Renaud later recalled that she had written the poems as a lark after dropping out of her convent school classes at the age of 16, and that the members of the group picked a number of them at random for publication at one of their meetings.

A similar collaborative spirit was evident in the production of the short avant-garde play Bien-être (The Good Life) by Pierre Gauvreau’s younger brother Claude in 1947. Claude himself starred in the play with the actress Muriel Guilbault, well known to the Quebec public through her work in radio and on stage, and also a future signatory of the manifesto. Five other members of the group were involved in the production: costumes were by Madeleine Arbour, later to become one of Quebec’s best-known designers and television personalities, and others worked on sets, lighting and stage direction. Gauvreau’s experimental text was more or less incomprehensible and the production was laughed off the stage after only a few minutes. Borduas later claimed that the evening had been decisive for him, making him realize that few in the Quebec public would ever accept Automatiste art and ideas.

But it was in the area of dance where the Automatistes had their greatest impact outside the visual arts. Françoise Sullivan and Jeanne Renaud (Thérèse’s younger sister) had left Montreal for New York in 1945 to study dance (Sullivan with Franziska Boas and Renaud with Hanya Holm and Merce Cunningham). Back in Montreal in 1948, they performed eight of their own choreographies at an event now considered the founding moment in Montreal’s dynamic tradition of modern dance. Sullivan’s Dédale (Labyrinth), in which the dancer, with no musical accompaniment, starts with a simple balancing movement of her left wrist and allows her whole body to be gradually overtaken by frenetic movement, is the closest choreographic equivalent that exists to what the Automatistes were doing in painting. In her Black and Tan Fantasy, danced with an innocent and primitive sensuality and humour to the accompaniment of a Duke Ellington tune, Sullivan wore a magnificent costume of painted burlap and rope created by Jean-Paul Mousseau. And the stunning photographs by Maurice Perron (another member of the group) of her Danse dans la neige (Dance in the Snow), performed on the slopes of Mont Saint-Hilaire in 1948, are an important art object in their own right.

By the early 1950s, the members of the group were geographically dispersed, with Borduas in New York (and later Paris), and Jean-Paul and Françoise Riopelle as well as Thérèse Renaud and Fernand Leduc (now married) in Paris, where they were joined a few years later by Marcelle Ferron (with three small daughters in tow). But, as the title of the book suggests, the “Automatiste Revolution” continued until 1960. It was during his years in New York and Paris that Borduas absorbed the influence of the abstract expressionists and produced the starkly beautiful black and white paintings for which he is best remembered today. And in Paris Riopelle, considered by the French to be part of their own artistic movement of “Abstraction lyrique,” painted the huge, glorious, mosaic-like palette-knife works that made him famous. Nasgaard’s discussion of these paintings is, in my opinion, as good or better than anything else that has been written about them. And the inclusion of the Montreal painters who came to maturity under the influence of the Automatistes, such as Rita Letendre, or who pushed their experimentation even further, such as Claude Tousignant and Guido Molinari, makes the book (and the exhibition it accompanies) a complete and convincing account of the transformation of Canadian art brought about by francophone Montreal artists in those years. The only omission from Nasgaard’s account of the 1950s—and it is a significant and puzzling one—is a discussion of the important works produced by Ferron after her arrival in Paris in 1953, paintings full of energy and movement that gained her an international reputation.

As Ellenwood points out, the publication Refus global, with a cover designed by Jean-Paul Riopelle, contained the twelve-page manifesto that has since become a cultural icon, and also a number of other texts by members of the group, including a lovely essay by Françoise Sullivan entitled “La danse et l’espoir” (“Dance and Hope”). It was the main text, however, because of its political content, that led to Borduas’s firing and that is remembered today. A cry of rebellion against Quebec society and a utopian call for the transformation of a world exhausted by rationalism and the technological domination of nature, it still resonates with the urgency of its message Relatively unnoticed when it first appeared (except for the repercussions against Borduas and a negative reaction in the press), it has been rediscovered by every generation of Quebec intellectuals since the Quiet Revolution. Quebec nationalists of the 1960s saw in it a precursor of their own revolt, and Marxists and socialists admired its critique of capitalism.

But in spite of its clear identification of the alliance between capitalism, technology and church power that perpetuated the status quo, the manifesto was neither nationalist nor socialist. Borduas and the other signatories dissociated themselves from the conservative nationalism that had dominated Quebec culture for so long (“To hell with holy water and the tuque,” they wrote), but they were just as cynical about the possibility of a left-wing revolution bringing about any real change (“As if a change of class meant a change of civilization, a change of desires and hopes”). The revolution they called for—an affirmation of the potential of each individual in society and the joyful transformation of the world through art—is probably best described as anarchist or utopian. It is probably this ability to resist being captured by any one ideology that explains why the manifesto, like the art of the Automatistes, still speaks to us with such urgency and authenticity today.

The exhibition of Automatiste works continues at the Varley gallery until February 28, 2010, after which it moves to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery of Buffalo, where the Automatistes will be exhibited for the first time in the company of their American contemporaries, the abstract expressionists. Fortunately, Nasgaard and Ellenwood’s book will be around—and will be appreciated—for a much longer time.