Resplendent Anarchy
A spectacular Montreal retrospective marks the golden anniversary of the modernists known as les Automatistes
By DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE

Montreal in the 1940s was a bleak place for any artist. The stultifying Roman Catholic Church, the corrupt Duplessis government and the negligible artistic community made creative life virtually impossible. As a young aspiring painter, I was taken on Saturdays to classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and had the good fortune to study with Paul-Emile Borduas.

An elegant and generous man, Borduas was soon to sit at the center of a group of French-Canadian painters that a local journalist dubbed les Automatistes--artists who were deeply influenced by Andre Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, which praises the creative force of the subconscious. After composing his own incendiary 1948 manifesto, Le Refus Global (Total Refusal), Borduas would eventually become the most important Quebecois artist of his generation.

In the spirit of Breton's tract, Borduas described "an untamed need for liberation," cried out for "resplendent anarchy" and criticized the "cassocks that have remained the sole repositories of faith, knowledge, truth, and national wealth." Signed by Borduas and 15 other Automatistes, Le Refus Global caused an immediate uproar. In the backlash, Borduas lost his job at the Ecole de Meuble, a somewhat progressive design school. This turned out to be a blessing, because his firing freed him to focus on the greater mainstream of international art.

Montreal's Musee d'Art Contemporain commemorates the 50th anniversary of the manifesto with a beautifully conceived exhibition of Automatist work. The show runs through Nov. 29. Fittingly, Borduas is the centerpiece: of 135 Automatist paintings, 95 are his. The son of a carpenter, Borduas was the oldest of the Automatistes--already 42 when their manifesto appeared--and his small house in St. Hilaire, 35 km outside Montreal, was the place where these artists discussed their concept for a better future. But shrugging off the dead hand of the present was a daunting enterprise. Borduas's early works, like Still Life with Flowers, 1934, demonstrate his sensitive perception but also display classical Beaux-Arts elements of construction--so that you can trace a diagonal from the upper left-hand corner of the painting to the lower right, and from the upper right-hand corner to the lower left, with a line through the center vertically and horizontally.

A voracious autodidact, Borduas craved escape from the stifling local art scene. He constantly reached outside his milieu for the contemporary vocabulary of art and absorbed it. In 1942, the same year that Andre Breton published his Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not, Borduas finished his Chantecler, No. 6, and Untitled, the latter a very large work for a gouache. The influence of Joan Miro emerges in this painting, as Borduas uses similar morphic shapes and brilliant colors to present an alternative abstract reality. His interchange between negative and positive space is very much a concept of that time.

Having burned his bridges at home, Borduas settled in New York City in 1953. He remained there until 1955, at a time of enormous creative energy and dialogue: the rise of Abstract Expressionism. As a whole, Borduas's paintings from this period show the exemplary courage of a man who had won recognition, not to mention notoriety, in his own country but left it all behind to immerse himself in the energetic abstractions of the New York School. He retained his quirks. At the time, most artists used rose madder--a pigment--in their oils, but in Easter, 1954, Borduas inexplicably uses it directly and scatters it all over the canvas. Yet he also uses browns, which would seem to evoke Montreal's long, cold winters. I think I detect in this work that Borduas painted from landscapes or used photos of landscapes as a reference.

Borduas moved to Paris in 1955, somewhat encumbered by a Montreal palette and the New York School approach. It's not so much that Borduas was a copyist as that he was opening himself up to learning. In such works as Untitled (No. 61), circa 1958, and Untitled (No. 52), circa 1960, he seems to articulate a newfound freedom that points the way to the simplicities of Minimalism, which were yet to come. The paintings are basically monochromatic. The productive Paris years suddenly ended in 1960 when Borduas died of a heart attack.

Borduas's fellow Automatiste, Jean-Paul Morriseau, has his eye on other Surrealists who were showing in Manhattan during the '40s. His moody Untitled, 1946, shows the great impact of Salvador Dali, but with a hint of the Canadian landscape. Medieval Battle, 1948, refers to the slender vertical figuration of Roberto Matta Echaurren and Wilfredo Lam.