The Automatiste Revolution
"The Automatiste Revolution" by Terrence Heath, Spring 2010, p. 118
Françoise Sullivan succinctly summed up Quebec’s mid-20th-century revolution in the arts as follows: “...there were seven magic years from 1941 to 1948 when it really existed, when it was getting stronger, and then it exploded.”
The magic, the growing strength and the inevitable fragmentation of the central energies of Québécois artists in this period are clearly laid out in the exemplary exhibition “The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941–1960,” curated by Roald Nasgaard. Seldom have I seen an exhibition that explores a historic range of work in such purely visual terms.
Although the primary focus of the exhibition is the paintings of the Automatistes, introductory and ancillary materials give some sense of the scope and depth of the revolution that reformed the arts in Quebec during and immediately after the Second World War. The Refus global, of course, is prominently displayed, but so are the articles, essays, theatre scripts, photos, illustrations and poems of writers associated with the visual artists. The interpretative dances of Françoise Sullivan and Jeanne Renaud, which were developed and performed in New York and Montreal in the late 1940s and reconstructed, danced and filmed in the 1980s, introduce the exhibition and give a sense of the sheer energy and seriousness of the artists who transformed the arts in Montreal.
The exhibition is relatively small, consisting of just 60 insightfully selected paintings and drawings. It is possible to walk through the exhibition and experience the artists’ struggle to rethink what it is to make art. From Borduas and Leduc to Molinari and Tousignant, the works convey the heady freedom occasioned by the impact of Surrealist writings on the artists who grouped themselves around Paul-Émile Borduas: from the recognition of the sheer materiality of paint and the exploration of non-illusionistic space and canvas surface to the dominance of tonality and the reassertion of order found in geometric abstraction. Each painting demonstrates these artists’ complex, driving desire to explore and invent. Each work’s place in the movement is worth discussing, but two sets of paintings were particularly striking and informative. On one long wall the curator has hung three works by Jean Paul Riopelle: Peinture (1947–48), in which the traditional composition involving figure and ground still holds sway, Belle-Île-en-Mer (1950), where the structure is gone and the surface is splashed and palette-knifed to create an almost over-all compositional effect, and Sans titre (1952), in which the tachisme of Riopelle’s mature works has been realized completely. Also striking are two small, late paintings by Borduas, Sans titre (no. 61) and Sans titre (no. 64), done in Paris around 1958. In these the artist has treated paint purely as material; the first is a red monochrome, the second a grey monochrome in which the paint has been moved around on the canvas in thick strokes. It is a final statement in the revolution Borduas provoked, and the starting point of the experimentation of McEwen, Letendre, Molinari and Tousignant, which would carry Québécois art-making into its next period of invention.
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