Reluctant Nationalistic Hero

Paul-Émile Borduas was anything but a quitter. Like all good artists, he constantly tried to push the boundaries, and when he hit a dead end, he looked for a different way forward. Forebears like Renoir, Degas and Manet, he later wrote, had closed “the cycle of naturalism.” Soon afterwards, he felt, the Cubists had slammed the doors of individual expression shut. Eventually, he discovered André Breton and realized that Surrealism might offer an exit, perhaps the only one. He kept reading, thinking, experimenting, discussing, further prying open the doors to “a vast domain hitherto unexplored, taboo, reserved for angels and devils,” the own inner world of the artist. By late 1941, Borduas was on the cusp of a major breakthrough.

If his production at that time is anything to go by, it must have been an exhilarating moment. As François-Marc Gagnon describes it in his authoritative...