Paul-Émile Borduas

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(b Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, 1 Nov 1905; d Paris, 22 Feb 1960). Canadian painter. He studied with the artist Ozias Leduc and from 1923 to 1927 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Montreal. After a short stay in Paris (1928-30), he lived in Montreal until 1941, when he moved to Saint-Hilaire. As a result of the Depression, Borduas was unable to continue the career of church decorator, for which his training with Leduc had prepared him, and found work as an art teacher. His appointment at the Ecole de Meuble, Montreal, in 1937 was a turning-point, making him an influential figure among a group of students, including Jean-Paul Riopelle, who were soon to be known as LES AUTOMATISTES.

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Borduas, Paul-émile (1905-60). Canadian essayist and painter, born in Saint-Hilaire, south-east of Montreal. He left school at 15 and was apprenticed to the ‘sage de Correlieu’, Ozias Leduc, church-decorator in his native village. Leduc sent him to the Montreal art school and then to France, where he worked on church restoration with Maurice Denis. He saw work by Matisse and Picasso, but felt uneasy in France and returned to teach at Montreal's École du Meuble. He describes movingly in Projections libérantes (1949) his patient, disturbingly silent teaching methods and his brushes with authority. His gaucheness, unorthodoxy, and hatred of academicism contributed to his success. He attracted a group of disciples, writers, painters, sculptors, and dancers—Riopelle, the Gauvreau brothers, Masson, Guilbault—whose originality he fostered and who had a subversive effect on Quebec's cultural progress from the 1940s. Borduas saw the need to free Quebec from the dead hand of clericalism. His group, Les Automatistes, exhibited in Montreal in 1942, in a variety of styles from Cubism to Fauvism. A collective manifesto in 1948, Refus global, cost Borduas his job. He left for Cape Cod and New York in 1951 and then for France in 1955, where he died a pauper and recluse.

When Breton invited the Automatistes to join the Surrealists, Borduas declined. Breton's dreams were not his. A prolific painter, he was a man of few words. His essays are a terse, angry, but eloquent testimony to one man's courage in challenging the clerical hold on thought and taste in post-war Quebec. Refus global paints the history of Quebec in the grip of fear and nausea. ‘Au diable le goupillon’, spits Borduas. It is beyond Christianity that we discover the ideal of human brotherhood. He denounces the twin hegemonies of capitalism and Marxism and makes an impassioned plea for freedom: ‘Place à la magie! Place à l'amour!’ Pierre Vadeboncœur salutes in Borduas the one Québécois courageous enough to assume the risks of art and go to the limits of his own artistic vision.

— Cedric May