Paul-Emile Borduas, A Critical Biography by Francois-Marc Gagnon

This handsome, massive volume is the product of long devotion to Borduas by François-Marc Gagnon, who met the artist while still a child. The author’s father, art critic Maurice Gagnon, wrote the first published article on Borduas and was the artist’s friend. François-Marc Gagnon wrote the first full-length book on Borduas, published in French in 1987 after 11 years of research, and subsequently arranged for the nearly 12,000 documents in Borduas’s archives to be microfilmed by the National Gallery, was special consultant for an issue of artscanada devoted to Borduas (Dec. 1978–Jan. 1979), curated the Borduas retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1988, and is constructing an online catalogue raisonné for the artist (http://borduascatalog.org). His intensive, ongoing research laid the foundation for important work by later scholars, such as Ray Ellenwood and Gilles Lapointe.

Now Gagnon’s 1987 book has re-emerged in English as an expanded version of 578 pages, with 194 splendid colour reproductions. Gagnon maintains that Borduas is “the exemplary figure of Canadian art today.” He meticulously traces Borduas’s transformative early career through his leaving school at age 16, his apprenticeship with Ozias Leduc, his frustrating time at the conservative École des Beaux-Arts, and his likewise unsatisfying study with Maurice Denis in Paris.

Returning to Montreal in 1930, Borduas began teaching at the new, relatively progressive École Nationale du Meuble in 1935. By 1937 “the subject [of his paintings] became a pure pretext” for form. Gagnon observes that Montreal had its enabling advantages: modern school-of-Paris masters like Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso were sometimes shown there, there were supportive intellectuals like Father Couturier, and there was a nucleus of advanced artists that led to the formation of the Contemporary Art Society in 1939.

We learn that Borduas was a highly self-critical artist with a penchant for destroying in a “destructive rage” work that did not satisfy him, but in 1941 he produced Green Abstraction, which he called “my first totally non-preconceived painting.” It presaged the 60 or so groundbreaking gouaches of 1942 that Borduas later criticized as “cubist” but which were clearly among the first examples in Canada of Automatism: produced with “no preconceived idea” and relied on for their organization on the unconscious. Gagnon analyzes these works thoroughly, but he could have gone on to clarify how Montreal was autonomously advancing at the same time as the Abstract Expressionists in New York. For example, Arshile Gorky made his breakthrough some time around 1941–42, arguably the first of the Americans to do so. David Anfam asserts that the first quintessential abstract expressionist painting was made by Clyfford Still in 1944.

But there were both “advances and retreats,” as Borduas returned to figuration ca 1945. Gagnon astutely downplays these works, emphasizing instead the tension within the Contemporary Arts Society, and then the controversy around Borduas’s Refus global, 1948, which is often regarded as the single most important cultural document in the history of Canada. Gagnon locates Refus global in the context of surrealist Pierre Mabille’s urge “to transform the world” and sociologist Marcel Rioux’s concept, “the ideology of confrontation,” an intense, anti-clerical reaction against backward-looking elites. As Borduas wrote, “To hell with holy water and the French Canadian tuque.” Refus global led to Borduas’s loss of both his marriage and his teaching position, and eventually to his self-exile first to Provincetown, then New York and ultimately Paris.

In New York Borduas came briefly under the influence of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, and gravitated toward all-over compositions, especially in the watercolours. In Paris he intensified his quest to escape subjectivity and achieve “rigorous objectivity.” He left behind tachism and produced his celebrated black-and-white paintings, such as The Black Star, 1957, and his “opaque, hermetic” monochrome paintings, the black ones being “as mysterious as death.” Gagnon speculates that they may have been influenced by Yves Klein, but they are radical in their own way.

Gagnon brings out aspects of Borduas’s career that may be surprising to some. For instance, the artist did so well in art markets abroad that both the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York and Arthur Tooth & Sons in London bought paintings outright. Also, in Paris Borduas came to see himself in terms of a “pan-Canadian” identity, not simply as French-Canadian.

The influences of Gagnon’s work on the catalogue raisonné seems evident, as he often works from checklists of exhibitions, striving to locate paintings and match them with the titles of the works shown. In the process he tends to develop little taxonomies and sometimes simply describes the paintings in terms of their composition or vocabulary, mentioning for example the dominant colours.

I admire Gagnon’s openness to doubt, as he often observes “it is difficult to know.” I would have preferred that he had also been more doubtful about “content” and not used that loaded term for the depicted objects in Borduas’s paintings; such usage has been abandoned by most art historians. Erwin Panofsky argued in Studies in Iconology (Westview Press, 1939) that “content” occurs at a deeper level than mere factual or conventional meaning. The content of Cézanne’s still lifes is not the apples, but rather—as Picasso observed—his anxiety.

Gagnon is surprisingly willing to use a painting’s title as his entrée to the work, and he strives more than I would think necessary to read some imagery into many of them, despite Borduas’s observation that the title of Morning Candelabra, 1948 (Museum of Modern Art) for instance, was “an afterthought.” There are a few other minor lapses. Borduas’s memorial exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (December 1960 to January 1961) should have been included in the Exhibition History. Also, I don’t agree that Rothko “had no connection with Surrealism,” nor do I find the all-overness that Gagnon sees in Franz Kline.

This is, however, an important book about an outstanding artist. McGill-Queen’s University Press has done a considerable service to Canadian art. ❚

Paul-Émile Borduas: A Critical Biography, by François-Marc Gagnon, translated by Peter Feldstein, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013, 596 pages, $75.00.

Ken Carpenter has been Guest Critic at the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, Chair of the Visual Arts Department at York University.