News

In 1953, a young Quebec artist named Jean-Paul Riopelle was having a painting show in Paris. The influential French anthropologist and art critic Georges Duthuit had taken an interest in the young painter and was penning an article for the periodical Canadian Art. But who should they get to translate? How about Samuel Beckett?

Is this the Canadian art history you know? Likely not. But it's the one being taught – rather improbably, one could argue – in an exhibition in Unionville, Ont., at the Varley Art Gallery. This small regional museum has conscripted art scholar Roald Nasgaard to assemble a show about the Automatiste movement in Quebec, documenting the groundswell of cultural change in the 1940s and 1950s that transformed both the course of both Canadian art history and society. It makes for riveting viewing, and it is long overdue.

There have been three moments in the history of Canadian art when we have stood at the vanguard of international developments. There's the advent of photo-conceptualism in Vancouver in the seventies. There's the emergence of Michael Snow's experimental films in the sixties and seventies. And there's the incendiary outbreak of Automatiste painting, literature, theatre and dance, created by a band of fledgling Montreal artists led by their mentor Paul-Émile Borduas.

Pierre Gauvreau, Colloque Exhuberant, 1944, © Pierre Gauvreau / SODRAC (2008).

Together, they defied the social, religious and spiritual orthodoxies that were holding Maurice Duplessis's Quebec society back from the modern era. Inspired by the French surrealist writings of André Breton (with his emphasis on automatic writing and painting) and the convulsive poetry of Pierre Mabille, Borduas and a younger crowd of art students championed freedom and a kind of orgiastic relationship to materials. The front-runners were Marcel Barbeau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Marcelle Ferron, Pierre Gauvreau, Bruno Cormier, Fernand Leduc, and Jean-Paul Mousseau – as well as the writer Claude Gauvreau and dancer/choreographers Jeanne Renaud and Françoise Sullivan. “Make way for magic! Make way for objective mysteries! Make way for love! Make way for necessities!” Borduas famously wrote in the group's 1948 manifesto, the Refus Global. And they did.

The show begins with some early, semi-representational works by Borduas and Pierre Gauvreau, paintings suggesting forms drawn from nature floating in an atmospheric, three-dimensional zone. By the mid-forties, though, these artists were compressing pictorial space in true modernist fashion, the surface becoming a unified field of gesture, a painterly unmade bed telling a tale of passion spent. Riopelle's dazzling, multifaceted palette-knife abstractions from the fifties and Borduas's concurrent sensuous trowelling of white, black and brown pigment – both represented in this show – mark the high-water mark of the movement, and are arguably the finest Canadian paintings ever made, running neck and neck with experimental painting in New York and Paris.

Marcel Barbeau, Rosier-feuilles, 1946, © Marcel Barbeau / SODRAC (2008) Automatiste

While Borduas and Riopelle anchor the show – and major loans make a persuasive case for their enduring reputations – there are other discoveries, such as the 1946, small-scale all-over abstraction by Marcel Barbeau, a breakthrough piece that calls to mind Jackson Pollock's roughly concurrent scrawling drips and splashes (though there is no indication that the artists knew of each other). The show and catalogue also make clear that the movement had many dimensions. Vitrines hold examples of key Automatiste writings – not just the Refus Global, with its Riopelle cover design, but the artist's book The Sands ofDream , with poems by Thérèse Renaud and drawings by Jean-Paul Mousseau (who also created costumes for dancer and choreographer Françoise Sullivan.) A DVD monitor in the gallery shows several key dances by Sullivan, including an open-air restaging of her iconic 1948 Danse dans la neige .

Paul-Emile Borduas, Bercement silencieux, 1956, Estate of Paul-Emile Borduas / SODRAC (2008) Automatiste

Despite the high drama, this is a story little told in English Canada (this is the first Automatiste show of this scale west of Montreal), and one that has long since been obscured from memory in New York or abroad. Many of the artists in the movement wound up in Paris, some with stopovers in New York, but only one artist – Riopelle – gained an enduring if B-grade international reputation, absorbed into the lyrical-abstraction storyline of European painters such as Georges Mathieu and Hans Hartung. (Breton described Riopelle as “ un trappeur supérieur ,” a kind of artist-woodsman, swinging his painterly axe in the urban wilderness.) When Borduas died in his Paris studio, in 1960, the revered Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam was swift to mount a retrospective show, honouring his career. But soon, a silence fell. In the decades that followed, the Automatiste painters have been suspended in a critical nowhere land between Europe and America, isolated linguistically from the United States and ill-served by Canadian museums in English Canada, which have been so slow to acclaim their fellow countrymen.

The current show will travel from Markham to Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where the pictures will rub shoulders, at long last, with those of the Automatistes' contemporaries in that museum's very distinguished collection – Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline. It may not be New York's Museum of Modern Art or London's Tate Modern, and it may be 60 years late, but it's a start.

The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941-1960 continues at the Varley Art Gallery in Unionville, Ont., until Feb. 28. It opens at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo on March 19.