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Fernand Leduc has a unique voice, one of the strongest in the exhibition. While retaining the better parts of his Beaux-Arts training, he takes his work into new territory in Untitled, 1954. The heavy use of the blue is beautiful and very much sets a Montreal landscape mood. The overall quality of the painting--the gradations of chromatic values from one color to another--is both sensitive and striking.

The Automatiste with the biggest international reputation is Jean-Paul Riopelle, who like Borduas attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and eventually took up permanent residence in Paris in 1948, where Riopelle met the art world with a burst of energy. His painting Untitled, 1949, attempts to explore a new way of constructing a painting through color simultaneously dripped and applied with a palette knife. It shows a different side of les Automatistes, moving away from the morphic subconscious quality of Surrealism and bringing him closer to the intuitive, slashing styles of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

As disparate as they may be in style and subject, les Automatistes shared a common vision that leaped beyond the borders of Quebec and Canadian provincialism. They were heralds, in a sense, of the Quiet Revolution. Largely ignored or vilified at home, most of them left for bigger ideas and greater opportunities. The modern explorers that they were, les Automatistes brought the New World back to the Old.

Artist Dorothea Rockburne has works in the Museum of Modern Art and Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, among others.END