The Master of Quiet
"The Master of Quiet" by E. C. Woodley, Winter 2009, pp. 88-92 / photos Alex Meyboom
It is a strange, even astonishing phenomenon that a century into its checkered history, the monochrome still represents an act of daring. Perhaps this is because to see a monochrome painting and engage with its particular demands and necessities involves an act of faith. A sustained, slow and spacious attention must be given to something that seems to be a blankness. In a sense, the colour of a monochrome is more a condition than something painted. It is a process that allows meaning to come into being. “Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet,” said the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, quoting Paul Klee speaking the words of Cézanne—words that can help orient us toward the late, overlooked paintings of Fernand Leduc.
The invisibility of Leduc’s work outside of Quebec, particularly his significant body of near-monochromatic layer paintings, the Microchromies, is almost as surprising as the persistence of the monochrome as a format. Leduc’s chromatically subtle paintings take their name from a musical term—microtonality—that refers to systems that use incremental notes between the whole tones and semitones of the basic Western scale. The effect they have on the viewer can be “terrifying, attractive,” to borrow observations made by the historian and critic René Payant of the late-1970s monochromes of the Montreal-born painter Louis Comtois. The borrowing is apt because Comtois, who died in 1990 in New York at the age of 45, considered Leduc “mon maître” and often visited his Paris studio, which was located in an abandoned foundry near the Place de la Bastille.
Inspired by the landmark 1971 retrospective of Josef Albers at the Met, Leduc gave himself the problem of dissolving the idea of Albers’s squares “and keeping only the light.” This infused the Microchromies with both more simplicity of form and more subtle and complex colour. In an interview at his current studio in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, Leduc says that “for me, the action of painting is like an asceticism, an ascetic way of working. You have a problem, and with it you are in the complete unknown; you have only your own desire and resources to resolve the problem. It’s an adventure, always an adventure...and you don’t know what will happen in the end.”
Born in Montreal in 1916, two years after the American monochrome painter Ad Reinhardt (whom Leduc resembles in terms of his relatively low profile and uncompromising approach), Leduc recently returned to Canada after almost 60 years abroad. Following the death of his wife, the poet Thérèse Renaud, in 2005, he wanted to be nearer to his daughter, the Montreal painter Isabelle Leduc. But despite his having been away so long, Leduc’s work has a rich and significant history here.
Since being “called to leave” his studies at a Montreal-area Catholic seminary to devote himself to painting in the late 1930s, Leduc has participated in some of the most advanced art-making ever seen in Canada. A central figure in Paul-Émile Borduas’s Automatiste movement, he was known for his contribution to the intellectual development of the group. Leduc was “the first to speak of the necessity of forming a group and the first to propose a collective manifesto,” notes Roald Nasgaard in his book Abstract Painting in Canada. The manifesto was to become the Refus global, one of the first heralds of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.
Although he produced writings that were precursors to the Refus global, and made a contribution to the 1948 manifesto itself, at the time of its publication Leduc was living in Paris. By 1950 the city would be home to a number of foreign-born abstractionists, among them his fellow Automatiste Jean Paul Riopelle, the Americans Ellsworth Kelly, Norman Bluhm and Sam Francis and the Chinese artist Zao Wou-ki.
In Montreal, Leduc and Riopelle had not known each other well. In Paris, the two saw each other often. In 1947, they curated the first European presentation of the Automatistes at the Galerie du Luxembourg, and in the same year were part of “L’Imaginaire,” organized by Georges Mathieu and Michel Tapié, the show that launched lyrical abstraction in France; they also mounted a two-person show at Galerie Creuze in 1950.
Riopelle, supported by André Breton, was the only Automatiste to sign a Surrealist manifesto and exhibit with the radical group—in the “VI Exposition internationale du surréalisme” of 1947. Leduc, scrupulously focused on his work—and on the morality of and transformational possibilities inherent in the process of working—formally rejected Breton’s interest in the Automatistes. In a letter to Borduas, he wrote that “for us the stress is on the authenticity of the works, for [the Surrealists] the works are at the service of their ideas.”
Leduc had been the first of the Automatistes to contact and correspond with Breton, in 1943. In 1945 the two met in New York, Leduc bringing up the subject of Paul Klee, who “was of capital importance to [the Automatistes]”; Breton, who saw painting as an adjunct to literary expression, “wasn’t interested in [Klee] at all.” In 1948, Leduc wrote in a personal letter to Breton that he had stopped coming to the Surrealists’ meetings due to the “heavy and hermetic atmosphere...I find it impossible to breathe in such an atmosphere and I doubt that youth could find there the dynamic power which would meet its aspirations.” Says Leduc now: “It was really the end. The Surrealist ‘Exposition’ of 1947 was not a good show and the movement had no truthfulness.”
Leduc began to move away from Automatism as a social principle, eschewing its insistence on a Surrealist-derived language of indefinite qualities such as desire. “What is Automatism? It’s hard to say. For me, personally,” Leduc explains today in his gentle way, “it is only the behaviour one has in front of a painting...to become like a child who works openly with what he has.” In Paris, Leduc read widely in both Western and Eastern philosophy. “I felt a need to interiorize a spirituality,” he says about this period.
He returned to Montreal twice to teach. The first time, in 1953, he found himself blacklisted after the fallout of the Refus global and found work only briefly in 1954. “Coming from a place of galleries and salons where artists could meet and exchange ideas,” as he puts it, he was troubled to find artists working alone and lacking exhibition opportunities. To rectify this, he founded the Non-Figurative Artists’ Association of Montreal, a group that, as Nasgaard writes, “played a pivotal role within Quebec’s artistic revolution.” In 1955 Leduc began working in hard-edge abstraction, and as the art historian David Burnett has pointed out, along with Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant, he established “the direction that radical art in Montreal was to take through the 1960s.”
Leduc returned to France in 1959, and unlike the two younger hard-edge painters, he was always attracted to an organic abstraction based in the natural world. As the 1960s progressed, his work was reminiscent less of anything in Montreal than of Jean Arp, Ellsworth Kelly and the Danish painter Richard Mortgensen. It was during a teaching stint in the early 1970s at Université Laval and UQAM that he began his Microchromies.
Decades later, in 2006, the artist Francine Savard was so excited after seeing a retrospective of Leduc’s work at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec that she could hardly sleep. She calls the show “une leçon de peinture” (a lesson in painting), and thinks the Microchromies’ lack of profile may be related to the fact that “Leduc didn’t live in Quebec and didn’t have the connection to New York that Molinari and Gaucher had.” Denise Leclerc, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada, believes that Leduc’s long-time residence in France affected his profile in Canada. Leclerc acknowledges that Leduc’s Automatiste period is what gets focused on: “I don’t think we have taken the later work into account as much as we should have, but there is still time for this work to take its rightful place. The process of understanding what Leduc was doing is still unfolding. He is a very important artist.”
Although the Microchromies were often misread, Gilles Toupin wrote perceptively in artscanada in 1972 that Frank Stella’s “cool attempt to push art to its last ditch gives him something in common with Fernand Leduc. Leduc, however, is closer to a cosmic point of view than Stella. Even though, as in the Microchromies, he works at color like a scientist, in the end his work reaches a level of mystic and human reference. The Microchromies are little cosmoses, in the way that rainbows are integrations of natural phenomena.”
Leduc’s method is itself an “integration of natural phenomena.” He works only in natural overhead light, normally on a horizontal canvas, beginning with a kind of freehand drawing in paint. Using first a brush and then a sponge, in a virtuoso improvisation directly on the surface of the canvas, he applies to the drawing as many as 100 or more layers of acrylic paint in different hues. Each layer influences the next, and is so thin that one can often still make out the linen or canvas below. A single work might include a number of conjoined panels all made using the same process.
Departing from the reductive impulse present in much monochrome painting, the works accumulate and concentrate history rather than break with it. The “last ditch” Leduc is still pushing toward can be traced back to the radical phenomenological inquiry that began in earnest in painting with Turner’s Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), a subjective immersion in a landscape of objective elemental energy and imperfect Bergsonian change. Leduc, like the Impressionists, studied the colour theory of Goethe and Chevreul. He says he has been influenced by Cézanne’s use of colour as energy in order “to build space,” and by the early modernist writings of Robert Delaunay. Jean Bazaine’s postwar Notes sur la peinture d’aujourd’hui, about the necessity of direct phenomenological engagement with the world, is also in evidence in Leduc’s monochromes. Bazaine knew Leduc well in Paris, even lending him his studio for a period of months before Leduc’s first return to Montreal.
Leduc’s abstracts from the 1940s seem to depict maelstroms, phenomenologies of cosmic violence like those referred to in the psalms. Conversely, his painting since 1970 demonstrates, rather than depicts, phenomena. The Microchromies have such an affinity for available natural light that they may, practically speaking, exist for only a couple of hours a day, when the light—perhaps a combination of natural and artificial—correctly engages the energetic frequencies of the layered paint and causes it to radiate like sound off a drum.
Leduc has written that the Microchromies are “about seizing pure duration.” A Microchromie that has not come to life in the moment is a kind of fiction that lies somewhere between the time of its making and the time of its (future) viewing. The works have an interesting and complex relationship to time, like a profoundly subjective clock that will only register certain elemental moments, what we might call the dynamic sublime. They connect the headspace of the viewer to the energies of whatever phenomena Leduc was moved by during the subjective improvisation involved in their making. “I dream now of capturing the special qualities of the gray light of this region, the fogs of Champseru and the Beauce plain,” Leduc once said, speaking of the area near Chartres where he lived and worked in an old presbytery in the 1970s and 1980s. Or the subject could be the light of the night sky, as in Microchromie 71 ZL violet de nuit (1971), a cool, slightly reflective surface capable of taking on an extraordinary weight and depth, like the still surface of a lake at night, but with the compact energy of a small animal.
That one must wait to see the Microchromies under favourable conditions means that, as the critic and art historian Michael Corris has written about the “black” work of Ad Reinhardt, they are “absolutely counter to the essential experience of commodity culture, which is the experience, first, of the image of the thing, rather than the thing itself.”
Leduc’s own black work, perhaps ironically, consists of a series of paintings made in response to his experience of watching the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo on television. Exhibited most recently in 2008, at Galerie Roger Bellemare in Montreal, they exemplify Leduc’s engagement with subjects outside the usual scope of the monochrome tradition. As he puts it, “There was something severe in the quality of light: you could see the bombs coming and they would light up the environment in great artifice...there was something of great beauty in the light, and also tragic, terribly tragic.” This is the dynamic sublime as the spectacle of contemporary warfare.
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