ART-CANADA: Automatistes on Show

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

MONTREAL, Sep 15 1998 (IPS) - It’s been 50 years since a group of artists and intellectuals defied the church-dominated society of French-speaking Quebec under Premier Maurice Duplessis and, in the process, jeopardized their careers and personal livelihood.

Known as the “Automatistes” a big collection of their mainly abstract paintings are now on show until November at Montreal’s Contemporary Arts Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. Canada Post also has unveiled at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull a series of stamps featuring the works of several of the Automatistes.

“Certainly it’s work that remains fresh,” says Dennis Reid, author of the Concise History of Canadian Painting. Reid told Inter-Press Service that, while the Automatists are now hailed in art circles across Canada, with the possible exception of Jean- Paul Riopelle they remain largely unknown outside this country.

“It would be interesting to see them in relation to American abstract expressionism. I think it would stand up well,” Reid says.

In particular, Reid points to Paul-Emile Borduas, the elder, teacher and leading thinker among the Automatistes, as “one of the greatest artists in the twentieth century.”

What sparked the anger of the conservative Catholic elites of Quebec in the summer of 1948 was a polemical manifesto issued by the Autonomistes. Entitled ‘Refus Global’ or ‘Total Refusal’, it urged Quebecers to “break with the conventions of society once and for all,” and for men and women to realize “in resplendent anarchy the fullness of their individual talents.”

Written by Borduas, it depicted Quebecers as “a little people huddled to the skirts of a priesthood viewed as the sole trustees of faith, knowledge, truth and national wealth, shielded from the broader evolution of thought as too risky and dangerous.”

Borduas subsequently lost his job as a teacher at Montreal’s Ecole du Meuble, a decorative arts institution and subsequently was treated in hospital for gastric ulcers. His wife left him, taking their three children with her, after he refused to let her work outside their home. Borduas later lived in New York City and Paris in self-imposed exile from Canada, eventually dying in 1960 – aged 54 – alone and destitute.

Recently, Manon Barbeau, the daughter of another member of the Automatistes, Marcel Barbeau, released a television documentary, which detailed how these artists as parents neglected their children in the pursuit of their own alleged selfish pursuits. However, Renee Borduas, the daughter of Paul-Emile Borduas has declared that she and her siblings blame Quebec society of the time for taking their father away from them. “When I lost Saint- Hilaire (Paul Borduas’s home town), I lost my relationship with the world, with a universe that I wouldn’t find anywhere else, that I had to re-invent.”

Quebec today is a modern, sophisticated province and the rate for common law marriages is the highest in Canada. This began with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when conservative Catholicism lost its grip – different to the 1940’s, the province was parochial, patriarchal and authoritarian with the church dominating every aspect of this society, including the government, education, culture and the police.

The Automatistes, states Dennis Reid, were “the first glimmer that there could be a Quebec culture that was not at its core Catholic and in essence colonial.”

While the Automatistes did not express strong opinions on the fractious relationship between Quebec and largely English-speaking Canada, present day nationalists in the province have looked to them as precursors for their own movement.

There are others who state that the Automatistes’ manifesto had nothing to do with politics. But Dennis Reid suggests that the Refus Global’s plea for personal liberation was a dangerous sentiment in the Quebec of the late 1940s. Also, the treatment of Borduas and his colleagues demonstrates that their statements had political ramifications.

The stance of the Automatistes was simply another manifestation in North America and Europe of literary, artistic and political movements in this century which have questioned the traditional relationship of the individual person and the society, adds Reid. He notes that the Quebec painters were heavily influenced by the French Surrealists.

Refus Global has largely been unread since 400s copies were mimeographed and produced in 1948, but quotes from the manifesto were on display along with the paintings in the Montreal showcase of the Automatistes’ work.

“It suggests a co-relation that I think is not immediately evident. Certainly not to the untutored visitor,” says Reid. In the late 90’s the Automatists are still an interesting artistic phenomenon, but their political bite appears to have been lost.

Pierre Gauvreau, one of the artists of the group still living here, is upset that a tobacco manufacturer is sponsoring the current Montreal show. “It makes me sick,” he said in a recent TV appearance.