Paul-Émile BorduasLife & Work

“Borduas discovered an entirely different way to think about the production of a painting…. His painting becomes increasingly assured, evident in the rich impasto, the strong sense of movement (toward either the periphery or the centre of the composition), the dramatic contrasts in the opaque colours (with white dominating), and the delicate use of transparency.”

– François-Marc Gagnon

Paul-Émile Borduas: Life & Work explores the artist’s fascinating, tumultuous career. It describes how, in the 1940s, Borduas founded the Automatistes, an avant-garde group of like-minded young artists and intellectuals. They were informed by the anarchist idea that, as Borduas said, “mankind will [one day] govern itself through a spontaneous, unrehearsed sense of order.” No other Canadian movement displayed such coherence in its practice. Borduas was the principal author of the Automatistes’ 1948 manifesto Refus global, which launched a frontal attack on the parochial political climate of Quebec. The incendiary publication caused Borduas to lose his teaching position in Montreal and, a few years later, he left the city permanently, first settling in New York and then in Paris, where he died in 1960. Borduas’s brash ideas contributed to the Quiet Revolution that swept Quebec in the 1960s, transformed Canadian visual culture, and had a lasting influence on politics in Quebec.

Copyright Information

Banner Image: Paul-Émile Borduas, The Black Star, 1957. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gérard Lortie. © Estate of Paul-Émile Borduas / SODRAC (2014). Photo © MMFA.