Background
Mr. Borduas was born in Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, Canada, on November 1, 1905; the son of Magloire Borduas, a carrier, and Éva Perreault, he was the fourth child in a family of seven.
Université de Montréal.
Art Canada Institute, Borduas explaining Study for Torso or No. 14, 1942.
Marcel Barbeau, Pierre Gauvreau, Madeleine Arbour, Paul-Émile Borduas, and Claude Gauvreau.
Paul-Émile Borduas in Paris, c. 1955.
Paul-Émile Borduas in the studio
Mr. Borduas was born in Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, Canada, on November 1, 1905; the son of Magloire Borduas, a carrier, and Éva Perreault, he was the fourth child in a family of seven.
Paul-Émile Borduas first attended the primary school in his native village, and then was given private instruction between 1912 and 1921. In 1922 he was fortunate to meet the painter Ozias Leduc, who lived on the Montée des Trente in Saint-Hilaire. Mr. Leduc took him on as an apprentice in some of his projects to decorate churches, notably the Pauline chapel of Saint-Michel cathedral in the diocese of Sherbrooke, the chapel of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Halifax, and the baptistry of Notre-Dame church in Montreal. The next year Leduc urged his young pupil to enrol in the School of Fine Arts of Montreal (École des beaux-arts de Montréal), which had recently opened.
By 1925 Emmanuel Fougerat, the school’s first director, had been replaced by Charles Maillard, who, along with Robert Mahias and Edmond Dyonnet, were Mr. Borduas’s teachers. Paul-Émile Borduas completed his studies in 1927, graduating from it with a "first diploma." Apparently he did not much enjoy the years he spent at the School of Fine Arts; the kind of training he had received from his first mentor (whom he referred to respectfully as Monsieur Leduc) was more to his liking. Moreover, he quarrelled with Maillard, a painter in the academic tradition, who taught his students to value regionalism and to despise modern art.
In January 1929 he began studies at the Ateliers d'Art Sacré in Paris. During his stay in Paris, Borduas kept a diary in which he made notes about the courses he took, visits to exhibitions (Pascin, Renoir, Picasso), and his travels in France, which he left to pursue church decoration work of Rambucourt, in the Meuse Valley, with Pierre Dubois in April.
Mr. Borduas moved to Canada in June 1930. He was expected to follow in the footsteps of his first mentor, painter Ozias Leduc, as a church decorator. In the autumn of that year Mr. Leduc took him on as an associate to decorate the church of the parish of Saints-Anges in Lachine. Thereafter, Paul-Émile Borduas tried to make his way as an independent decorator. But his efforts to obtain commissions in his own name for various Montreal churches, including Saint-Denis, Saint-Jean-de-la-Croix, and Saint-Vincent-Ferrier, proved unsuccessful. The depressed economy and the fact that he was still relatively unknown might account for these setbacks. His only commission was a station of the cross - incidentally quite similar to one painted by Leduc for the church at Saint-Hilaire - that was purchased by the church of Saint-Michel in the parish of Rougemont.
He returned to Saint-Hilaire in June 1930 (his funds being depleted), began teaching part-time, and in 1933 returned to teaching high school for the Catholic School Board of Montréal. In 1937 Mr. Borduas was finally appointed professor of drawing and decoration at the École du Meuble in Montreal, at an annual salary of $1,200, replacing Jean-Paul Lemieux, who had left to teach at the École des Beaux-Arts de Québec. This school, then under the direction of Jean-Marie Gauvreau, would prove a stimulating environment for Borduas because of the presence of architect Marcel Parizeau and art historian Maurice Gagnon, as well as of the young people who were to be his students.
A turning point in Paul-Émile Borduas’s career was his discovery of Surrealism and, more particularly, in 1938, of a text by André Breton entitled "Le château étoilé." In this piece, Mr. Breton quotes the famous advice of Leonardo da Vinci, who had urged his pupils to look for a long time at an old wall until they saw, emerging in its cracks and stains, patterns they only had to "copy" to make original pictures; André Breton found in this approach a way of resolving the opposition between the objective and the subjective, but at a higher level.
At the École du meuble Mr. Borduas met the architect Marcel Parizeau and the art historian and critic Maurice Gagnon, who was hired at the same time. Soon he would also become acquainted with a number of like-minded young artists and intellectuals who were keen to push the rigid boundaries of Quebec society. They included his students Jean-Paul Riopelle, Marcel Barbeau, and Roger Fauteux, and through them some students from the École des beaux-arts: Françoise Sullivan, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, and Maurice Perron.
Paul-Émile Borduas also met Jean-Paul Mousseau, then at the Collège Notre-Dame in Montreal, and later, Marcelle Ferron, after she left the École des beaux-arts in Quebec City. Under Borduas’s leadership these artists formed the group that came to be known as the Automatistes, the future signatories of the manifesto Refus global (total refusal).
In the early 1940s the Automatistes met at Mr. Borduas’s studio on Mentana Street or at Fernand Leduc’s studio; these spaces offered the group members the freedom to broach any subject - political, religious, social, or artistic - and to discuss each other’s opinions and ideas. They also participated in so-called forums - public debates on modern painting, non-representational work, and abstraction - held in schools in Montreal (Externat classique Sainte-Croix, Collège Saint-Laurent) or in nearby communities (Collège classique de Sainte-Thérèse). These forums were sometimes accompanied by exhibitions.
Paul-Émile Borduas started to experiment with nonfigurative work, and his exhibition of gouaches in 1942 at the Hermitage, an exhibition hall owned by the Collège de Montréal, drew the attention of the critics. He continued to experiment in this direction, and the following year he exhibited abstract oil paintings at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal. These new works were not greeted by collectors with the same enthusiasm that his gouaches had been received. In this period, too, Mr. Borduas's influence over his students at the École du Meuble as well as at the École des beaux-arts and the Collège Notre-Dame had begun to grow. He became the leader of the Automatistes movement and, together with his friends, exhibited in makeshift galleries from 1946 to 1947. These included Rue Amherst, at the house of Madame Gauvreau at 75 Sherbrooke Street West in Montréal and the small Galerie du Luxembourg in Paris. It was in one of these exhibitions that Borduas exhibited his painting Sous le vent de L’lle in 1947. The painting shows a continent rather than an island and fragmented pieces of objects that freely twirl around in the space over the land.
The Automatistes movement culminated in the publication of the manifesto Refus global in 1948. In this manifesto, which was a collective effort but nonetheless mainly edited by Borduas, the authors denounced the old ideology of the preservation of past values - those values exemplified in the slogans "the past is our master" and "je me souviens "- and proclaimed the importance of opening up Québec society and culture to intellectual developments from around the world. Borduas's activity eventually cost him his teaching position. In 1949 he attempted to justify his actions in an autobiographical pamphlet entitled Projections libérantes, but this proved to be a wasted effort. He would never return to his position as teacher. Borduas found himself without work or reliable resources in Quebec.
Paul-Émile Borduas now had only the income derived from his painting to live on. The difficulties caused by his dismissal from the École du Meuble led him to separate from his family and to think about the possibility of leaving the country. He sold his house in Saint-Hilaire and made preparations to leave for New York. This was, however, still the period in which MacCarthyism reigned supreme in the US. Borduas had difficulty crossing the border because the authorities suspected him of having communist sympathies.
From 1953 to 1955, Mr. Borduas lived in New York, where conditions were less suffocating than in Québec. His painting took an enormous leap when he came into contact with the American abstract expressionist movement, attending their exhibitions and meeting their members - artists such as Franz Kline. With the support of several Quebec collectors (notably Gérard Lortie) and two New York galleries (the Passedoit Gallery and the Martha Jackson Gallery), he was able to rent a large studio in Greenwich Village. This period was extremely important for the development of his art and career. His first New York exhibition was held at the Passedoit Gallery from 5 to 23 January 1954, and attracted favourable notices. Martha Jackson eventually became the sole representative of his work in the city. During this same period his student Jean Paul Riopelle was already exhibiting his paintings at the much more prestigious Pierre Matisse Gallery.
In the hope of receiving more recognition in France, Paul-Émile Borduas left for Paris in 1955. His exile in Paris, however, proved to be particularly painful. Here, he did not find the success he had hoped for, and it was not until 1959 that he obtained his first solo exhibition at the Saint-Germain Gallery - four years after his arrival. Without the company of his friends Mr. Borduas felt bored in Paris and his health declined.
His final compositions are all painted in contrasting black and white and only occasionally accompanied by a different colour. L'étoile noire from 1957, a work which is probably his masterpiece, is an example of this type of painting. Artistically closer to Piet Mondrian, Pierre Soulages or Franz Kline in Paris, Mr. Borduas cut himself off completely from the Surrealist movement; from the automatist technique he only retained the spontaneous manner in which he spread his paint on his support. His final canvases, essentially calligraphic works, reflected his desire for a new, though never realized, place of exile - this time Japan.
Untitled
Ouvertures imprévues
Untitled
Untitled
1488
Self-portrait
Decorative Project for the Chapel of a Château, No. 1: Study for Choir Elevation
Decorative Project for the Chapel of a Château, No. 4: Study for Stained Glass Window
Trees in the Night
Abstraction No. 7
Pointe-au-Chêne
Geranium
Poppies of the Night
Mirror of Frost
Blue-White-Red Abstraction
Maurice Gagnon
The Promises of Wine
Composition I Blue
Begonia
White Ground
Mirage on the Plain
Nature's Parachutes (19.47)
Leeward of the Island (1.47)
The Return of Past Imprisoned Signs
Delicate Rustlings
Sea Gull
The Climb
Still-life (Pineapples and Pears)
Reverend Father Carmel Brouillard, O.F.M.
Les vases de la mer chauffées à blanc
Abstraction (Fleur-âne or Head of a Horse)
Abstraction No. 30 ( Cry in the Night)
Frost Garden
On 11 June 1935 Paul-Émile Borduas married Gabrielle Goyette, the daughter of a Granby doctor, with whom he would have three children: Janine, Renée and Paul. In October 1951 his wife and children left him.