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THE PLASTICIENS AND BEYOND MONTREAL 1955 - 1970

Varley Art Gallery of Markham CONTACT INFO

Varley Art Gallery 216 Main St Unionville, ON L3R 2H1

905-477-9511 ext. 3263 http://www.visitthevarley.com/

ABOUT THE GALLERY

The Varley Story

The Group of Seven

The Group of Seven is famously known to have established a distinct aesthetic to the Canadian landscape, its members are historically recognized for the impact they have made on the Canadian art movement. Frederick Varley, Tom Thomson, J.E.H MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frank Johnston, and Franklin Carmichael would first meet as employees at the design firm Grip Ltd in Toronto. These six men would come together during and after work discussing bold new directions for Canadian Art, they were joined by A.Y Jackson and Lawren Harris in 1913. With the support of Dr. James MacCallum, an artist and university professor, the group raised money to build the Studio Building for Canadian Art in Toronto. It was there that they would create masterpieces as they discovered the distinct light of the Canadian atmosphere and capture it in bold new ways. The production the group was interrupted as they suffered tragedy when Tom Thomson, one of the founding members died in mysterious circumstances; shortly after, some of the members left to serve in the First World War.

It was not until 1920 that the Group of Seven officially formed with their first exhibition in Toronto. Once their popularity grew, the artists began to travel Canada capturing what inspired them. The group shared a like vision concerning art in Canada. They were imbued with the idea that an art must grow and flower in the land before the country would be a real home for its people. The group was not limited to its seven founding members; they eventually changed their name to the Canadian Group of Painters. In total, the group included eleven members: Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, J.E.H MacDonald, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, A.J. Casson, Edwin Holgate, and LeMoine FitzGerald. The Group of Seven’s determi- nation and belief in Canadian culture prevails to this day. They have become the most famous artists in Canadian history and are great contributors to Canadian culture symbolizing for many a concept of a distinctly Canadian Identity.

Frederick Varley

Frederick Horsman Varley or Fred as he is more commonly known, is often recognized as Canada’s greatest portrait artist and lyrically expressive landscape painters. Varley was born in Sheffield, England in 1881 where he studied fine art. In 1909 he married and later immigrated to Canada where he got a job in the design firm Grip Ltd in Toronto. It was there that he met a group of artists that would later form the Group of Seven. Renowned for their contribution to Canadian art, the artists were joined by their frustration of the lack of Canadian art that was being created at the time.

Originally a portrait artist, Varley sought to introduce a new note of candid portrayal of the human form. Ironically, he is best known for his landscapes. He later integrated the human figure into landscape in a manner that spoke of happiness and laughter.

Varley’s reputation landed him success in various art exhibitions and a position as the head of the department of painting and drawing at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts. He would be the first to acknowledge British Columbia’s unfamiliar landscapes which had opened him to fresh modes of expression. Howev- er his prosperity was short-lived after drastic pay cuts to his job, failing business and art ventures, and a break up with his wife. His efforts to capitalize on his paintings failed, he stopped painting, and was left penniless.

Varley eventually picked up the paint brush again, his desire to follow his passion lead him to various places but it was not until much later in his life he was recognized for ABOUT LES PLASTICIENS

Four young artists, all in their mid-to-late twenties—Jauran, Louis Belzile, Jean-Paul Jérôme, Fernand Toupin—unveiled a personal exhibition, Les Plasticiens, in the gallery space at L’Échourie (February 11 to March 2, 1955). They promoted their cause with a strikingly designed abstract-geometric poster and with a manifesto, the Manifeste des Plasticiens, that defined their aesthetic program. The event has been called Montreal’s second avant-garde revolution after the Automatistes in the 1940s. Geometrism had a history that reached back to his own generation’s rejection during the 1940s of the geometric styles that dominated abstract art in the years before the Second World War. The latter’s strictures and idealist ideologies had come to look quite irrelevant in the face of the liberating spontaneity that Surrealism offered. This was a prejudice the Automatistes’ generation had shared with their Abstract Expressionist contemporaries in New York. Certainly the Plasticien program, more firmly than anything heretofore in Montreal, rejected Automatisme’s pictorial illusionism and its accompanying poetic and narrative allusions, and it did so by refocusing aesthetic attention onto the immediate plastic facts of painting—tone, texture, form and line—and attributing to these plastic facts an inherent capacity for dynamic artistic expression. All four artists had previously participated in two of the group exhibitions held regularly at a Montreal bookstore, the Librairie Tranquille: first in late spring 1954, after which they began to meet weekly to discuss painting issues, and then during the following fall. When the latter show was given coverage in L’Autorité on November 6, 1954, the review not only singled out the four of them but also dubbed them, perhaps for the first time, “Plasticiens” and hailed them as the true artists of the future. This was more than good luck, however, because the reviewer was in fact one of their own, Jauran, writing under a pseudonym. The title of his hardly disinterested review is self-explanatory, “Après les automatistes et les romantiques du surréalisme: Les Plasticiens.” His review was in effect a practice run for the 1955 manifesto. Other supportive reviews followed, including a broadcast on Radio-Canada on November 16, 1954, in which Leduc praised the same four artists for their formal rigour, which he said offered a “salutary counterweight” to the Surrealism that still predominat- ed among the young painters. Former Automatiste that he was, however, Leduc could not resist issuing a warning to be careful of the word “plasticien,” anxious that it might “imply the disem- bodiment of painting” or reduce it to some kind of “square-circle-triangle” décor. Artist Biography

LOUIS BELZILE Louis Belzile was a painter and sculptor. In the mid-1950s Belzile was formally the most illusionistic of the first Plasticiens. In his compositions he preferred busy curving cubistic interweaves, glowing with inner light and receding shadows. His surfaces are always thick with paint and conspicuously textured with the palette knife, stylistic characteristics he does not abandon even as he flattens his compositions and sharpens his edges. When he tautens his geometry in the later 1950s his images often function as signs, diagrams or architectural structures. At mid-decade he was experimenting with irregularly shaped canvases. In his later work, Louis Belzile devoted himself to painting the effects of light on a ground of evanescent geometric forms.

Pieces by Artist CAT. 9 Untitled, 1955 Oil on board 73.2 x 31.5 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1992.289)

This piece uses the rhomboid format with miniaturist Paul Klee–like jauntiness. Its soft-edged squares and rectangles are flat, on the surface and playfully dispersed, such that they jostle for lateral position as well as push and pull within optical space.

Organized as a Cubist grid, delicately conceived and executed, but with its rectangular facets splayed out across its panel surface.

CAT. 10 Untitled, c. 1957–58 Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard 81 x 101.5 cm Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, gift of Martine Brossard (D 97 64 P 1)

His surfaces are always thick with paint and conspicuously textured with the palette knife, stylistic characteristics he does not abandon even as he flattens his compositions and sharpens his edges. When he tautens his geometry in this later piece, his images often function as signs, diagrams or architectural structures.

CAT. 11* The Circle, 1957–58 Oil on board 73.1 x 71 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1992.149)

Belzile preferred busy curving cubistic interweaves, glowing with inner light and receding shadows in his compositions. His surfaces are always thick with paint and conspicuously textured with the palette knife, stylistic characteristics he does not abandon even as he flattens his compositions and sharpens his edges. When he tautens his geometry in the later 1950s including this piece. His images often function as signs, diagrams or architectural structures. Artist Biography

CHARLES GAGNON Charles Gagnon was more ambiguously a post-Plasticien. He was more a post-second-generation Abstract Expressionist. Nor is he Post-Painterly in the American sense, yet he works with fields of colour and hard edges. He is also elusive, because he worked indiscriminately across a variety of media: film, photography, collage and Duchampian box constructions as well as painting. While nominally an abstract painter, he always stayed close to nature and perhaps never really abandoned the landscape. He produced work uncompromisingly abstract and he kept the perceptual experience of his paintings openly self-con- scious events, resistant to final resolutions. Charles Gagnon considered artmaking a form of communion that aspired to a non-intellectual, spiritual dimension.

Pieces by Artist CAT. 69 Fragment with Three Signs, 1960 Oil on canvas 51 x 61.2 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, anonymous gift (2003.61)

Gagnon’s compositions are unusual in that they look arbitrarily cropped from a larger scene, in a photographic sort of way. Notice the detail of the black band that runs along the top and right side of Fragment avec trois signes, a partial framing device that evokes the possibility of a much larger lost picture whose absence has been compensated for by weighing in with some gestures that mark up its surviving upper right corner.

CAT. 70 The Gap, 1962–63 Oil on canvas 173 x 198.5 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (2006.02)

Because of its New York roots, his painting developed quite differently from that of his Montreal contemporaries, showing affinities with De Kooning at the beginning of the 1960s, while the second-generation Abstract Expressionist Alfred Leslie provided the model for Gagnon’s Gap paintings including this one. Both Joseph Cornell and Rauschenberg stand behind the collages and the box constructions.

CAT. 71 Luncheon on the Grass, 1965 Oil on canvas 239 x 183 cm Collection of Pierre Lassonde

Gagnon redefined visual locations as hard-edge crisp lines for the eye to bump up against and quite consciously need to step over in order to get from one pictorial terrain to another. If this painting indeed refers to Édouard Manet’s painting of a century before, it also replicates the way that Manet collaged together its several sections and disparate spaces, except that Gagnon made explicit the seams between them.

CAT. 72 The Sound, 1966 Enamel on board and on aluminum 81.3 x 81.3 cm Private Collection

Even at his most sensuous, Gagnon always does something to keep his viewers intellectually alert. In Le Son (The Sound, 1966, CAT. 72), he coaxes them to wag their heads and shift their feet as if participating in some kinetic art event. The raw aluminum surface has been worked vigorously in circular movements with something like a Brillo pad. In the centre sits a black square that looks like an abstract quotation from one of his other paintings. But maybe not, because it also seems to sit—and this is not a slip-of-the-hand accident—on a finely drawn ledge as if it really were an end view of some kind of obdurate box, some miniaturized version of Tony Smith’s minimalist steel Die, 1962. The industrial shine of the aluminum is smudged with two or three signature handprints, strays from Pollock or Rauschenberg. Visual ambiguity prevails whether the viewer moves to the right or to the left; light flickers and sparkles when caught by the grooves that Gagnon has swirlingly etched into the metal surface.

CAT. 73 Glory No. 2, 1969 Oil on canvas 203 x 203 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1994.01)

Glory No. 1, 1968 (MACM) and Glory No. 2, 1969 (CAT. 73), might suggest that Gagnon has become a pure colour-field painter, or at least a field painter. The Glory paintings have little colour, and rather than being even and flat, they are conspicuously executed in a crisscross pattern of grisaille brushstrokes. They are entirely sensuous, but their reflective surfaces and the mechanical regularity of the brushstrokes impart to them an impersonality, whose quality is different from the hard-edge precision of Gagnon’s fellow post-Plasticiens. Their white borders relate the Glory paintings to photography, as if they are huge enlarge- ments of snapshots.

CAT. 74 December Steps, 1968–69 Oil on canvas 203.2 x 274.2 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, purchase, Saidye and Samuel Bronfman Collection of Canadian Art (1969.1623)

Gagnon’s paintings work within another set of dynamics, which he furthered (CAT. 74) on a grand scale in the Step paintings from near the end of the 1960s, inspired by a performance conducted by Seiji Ozawa of the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu’s 1967 November Steps. The paintings in this series are large; Gagnon likened them to movie screens because of their shape and surrounding black bands. They can be severe, their borders funereally black and the creamish centres almost featureless when seen head on, activated only when seen from the side. They are also pleasurably tactile and capaciously embracing, and once we have “performed” them, so to speak, they settle into a mood of quietude.

CAT. 75 Marker No. 5, 1973 Oil on canvas 203.5 x 203.5 cm Private Collection

In the 1970s his facture became sumptuous, sometimes to wrench us into some dark Wagnerian mood, sometimes to make us swoon deliciously painted pink and blue rococo skies in his Marker No. 5 painting. But always, as quickly as he tempts us with pictorial illusions, he denies us with that hard Montreal line. An intellectual check is always there, in the form of those crisp windows within windows, the black or white borders or the hard-edge horizontal breaks that restate the artificiality of the construction and articulate the complexity of vision, feeling and thought that is at stake. Artist Biography

YVES GAUCHER Gaucher’s beginnings were quite different from those of his fellow hard-edge painters. In the early 1960s he was essentially known as a printmaker, having quickly established himself as a prize-winning participant in international print exhibitions. Gaucher had no early grounding in Automatisme, though he was certainly alert to contemporary avant-garde activities in Montreal. Around 1955–56 he organized and performed in some jazz sessions at the Galerie L’Actuelle and found the scene exciting, even if he was not particularly interested in the kind of art shown there.His prints of the early 1960s are remarkable aesthetically and for their technical innova- tions, demonstrating extensive experimenta- tion with relief and lamination, but their imagery is vaguely naturalistic and has little to do with geometry. His paint-heavy small tachist paintings from 1954–55, share a delight in material physicality. From his early commitment to the texture of matter, Gaucher also knew what he was sacrificing when he turned his painting flat and hard-edge. Sometime in 1962 Gaucher inserted a single straight line into one of the prints, and then other rectangular subdivisions. Soon he had adopted a full-fledged geometry, staking out his place in the Plasticien ambience with his seminal suite, En hommage à Webern (In Homage to Webern), 1963, and the other relief prints related to it, until by 1964 and 1965 he made painting his principal preoc- cupation. Jazz and Indian, electronic and atonal contemporary music have played a major role in inspiring Yves Gaucher’s art practice.

Pieces by Artist

CAT. 61 Yellow Fugue, 1963 Relief print and embossment, with highlights, on laminated paper 56.5 x 76 cm Private Collection

These prints were crucial to Gaucher’s evolution into a Plasticien painter, or rather, to his birth as a post-Plasticien one. They dispense with quasi-biomorphic shapes, turning them not into geometric planes to be balanced against one another but into a system of pure notations: lines, squares and dashes, sometimes inkless, sometimes black and grey, eventually introducing colours in Fugue jaune (Yellow Fugue), and Pli selon pli (Fold upon Fold). Gaucher would later call them “signals,” which bounce the eye from one point of focus to another, gathering into clusters of coherent relationships that as quickly dissolve and reform into new ones as the eye moves on. The prints look rigorously structured, but their deportment is free and spontaneous, their formal order at odds with the vivacity of their effect.

CAT. 62 Fold upon Fold, 1964 Relief print and embossment, with highlights, on laminated paper 56.5 x 76 cm Private Collection

CAT. 63 Square Dance, Red Modulations, 1965 Acrylic on canvas 219 x 219 cm Private Collection, England

In 1963 Gaucher bought Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color as part of a systematic study of colour theory. His first important series of paintings to emerge out of the Webern prints were the retinally provocative and rhythmically kinetic Danses carrées (Square Dance) paintings, whose symmetric choreography echoes the regularized steps and movements of the folk dances they are named after. They are squares turned 45 degrees, their colour fields energized by redeploying the vocabulary of signals he had invented for the Webern prints, with colours subtly adjusted to produce effects of afterimage or other colour interactions. Gaucher had obviously looked closely at Mondrian’s Boogie Woogie paintings but adopts an often idiosyncratic colour palette that pays no allegiance to the Neo-Plasticist primaries. The Square Dance paintings were the closest that Gaucher came to making Op art.

CAT. 64 Blue Raga, 1967 Acrylic on canvas 122 x 122 cm Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, purchase (A 67 18 P 1)

The Square Dance paintings were the closest that Gaucher came to making Op art. During the mid-1960s he exploited their basic principles in the Signals/Silences series. At this time Gaucher is forging a direction based less in the “objectivity” of relations between colours, veering instead toward a subjective immersion in colour, as if to evoke the state of trance that Rothko had suggested. In both series he reverts to rectangularity, aligning his signals horizontally and organizing them symmetrically. The consequences are significant. The single colour of the grounds of the paintings becomes their major theme. The signals and other bands of colour are no longer the main event, as it were, but serve to enhance and intensify the breadth and depth of its hue. These paintings are slower. They unfold their rhythms more discreetly, and they introduce a mood of contemplativeness that will come to reign supreme in the long series of Grey on Grey paintings that Gaucher began in December 1967.

CAT. 65, p. 12 Cardinal Raga, 1967 Acrylic on canvas 182.9 x 182.9 cm Art Gallery of York University, Toronto

CAT. 66 MX-P-ST/68, 1968 Acrylic on canvas 182.9 x 182.9 cm Collection of Germaine Gaucher

Part of the Grey on Grey series. This series which began in symmetry, their structure quite easily analyzed, but in the three paintings shown in the exhbition, symmetry has vanished altogether and only Gaucher’s well-practised intuition has determined the exquisitely tuned details of line lengths, tonalities and placements. Thus the expansive MX-P-ST/68, 1968, articulated by only five sparsely distributed line signals, is majestically generous and reverie inducing. Less so R-M-III N/69, 1969, which comes near to the end of the series; this painting is altogether brittle, quick and edgy. Gaucher always applied a succession of negating descriptions to the Grey on Greys. They are “non-object,” “non-physical,” “non-impact,” “nonscale,” “non-structure,” “non-colour” and so on. But every detail matters in them. It counts whether they are horizontal, square or vertical, how long or short the lines, their number and tonality, the languid or staccato relations between them, even the particular chromatic cast of the grey fields, though that may be only subliminally detected when the paintings are seen alone.

CAT. 67 R-M-III N/69, 1969 Acrylic on canvas 304.5 x 203.5 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1981.07)

CAT. 68 YG I O/N, 1968 Acrylic on canvas 275 x 203.5 cm Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, purchase (A 89 26 P 1)

JEAN GOGUEN Jean Goguen became a Plasticien because he was convinced that form, colour and matter were the fundamentals of the art discourse; he insisted on incorporating chromatic lyricism in his geometric structures. After working in a post-Automa- tiste manner, Jean Goguen turned to geometric abstraction sometime between 1957 and 1959. Goguen claimed, however, that unlike his fellow artists in Art abstrait, he was not following Mondrian nor did he have any other connections with European geometric abstraction, but had chanced upon geometry while painting much more gesturally. As he tells it, it was entirely by accident that “a small, white square” appeared on the black and white painting he was working on. “The dynamism of this little square was so intense that it forced me to totally restructure the canvas around it. This is when I became convinced of colour’s energizing quality and the value of geometry in abstraction.”59 However that may be, through a long series of large gestural black and white ink works on paper, which he executed during the 1950s, we can observe an increasing tightening of structure and a regularizing of gesture culminating in the monumental architectural rigour of his last drawings from 1959. In his essay in the exhibition catalogue he spoke in the language of Neo-Plasticist utopia, intending his work to participate in the creation of a larger social good: “It is especially urgent to solicit the collective participation with the purpose of constructing a livable world.”60 In the 1960s Goguen had, as did Denis Juneau, a bout with Op art.

Pieces by Artist

CAT. 42 Yin + Yang = 1, 1957 Acrylic on board 122.2 x 122 cm Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, gift of Joyce and Larry Nadler (D 00 104 P 1)

In paintings like Yin + Yang = 1, 1957 (CAT. 42), Goguen tosses about his geometry with some Automatiste abandon, but on the whole his work of the second half of the 1950s, whether in the gestural drawings or the geometric paintings he showed in Art abstrait, hews close to Molinari.

CAT. 43 Untitled, 1959 Ink on paper 66.5 x 102 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, gift of Colette Goguen (1992.189)

Through a long series of large gestural black and white ink works on paper, which Goguen executed during the 1950s, we can observe an increasing tightening of structure and a regularizing of gesture culminating in the monumental architectural rigour of his last drawings from 1959.

CAT. 44* Dynamic Pulsation, 1958 Acrylic on board 122 x 122 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, purchase, made possible by a Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest (1993.17)

After working in a post-Automatiste manner, Jean Goguen turned to geometric abstraction sometime between 1957 and 1959. Goguen claimed, however, that unlike his fellow artists in Art abstrait, he was not following Mondrian nor did he have any other connections with European geometric abstraction, but had chanced upon geometry while painting much more gesturally. As he tells it, it was entirely by accident that “a small, white square” appeared on the black and white painting he was working on. “The dynamism of this little square was so intense that it forced me to totally restructure the canvas around it. This is when I became convinced of colour’s energizing quality and the value of geometry in abstraction.”

CAT. 82** Untitled, 1959 Ink on paper 66.5 x 101.4 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1991.10) Artist Biography

JAURAN (RODOLPHE DE REPENTIGNY The leader and theoretician of the First Plasticiens, Jauran left a substantial body of work in art criticism—more than a thousand texts on the scope and ambition of his aesthetics.

As a painter, Jauran was largely self-educated. He stopped painting when he left for Europe and resumed in 1953, once back in Montreal. Jauran’s Equilibrium, the first painting he showed after returning from Paris, is a Cubist-type still life. Unlike Toupin’s Échourie, which tilts its mutedly tinted planes into atmospheric space, Jauran’s still life is uncompromisingly flat with solid unmodulated colours, the effect underscored by the rough weave of the jute canvas. But Jauran’s hard-edged polygonal planes retain memories of jugs or decanters set out on a tabletop in a domestic interior, and gravity continues to exert its pull in a number of still life motifs (No. 40, c. 1953–54, NGC; No. 41, 1955, CAT. 4) or in the landscapes in which foregrounds of helter-skelter planes rise up before some deeper indefinite space.

Sometime in 1954 he appears to have turned away from these naturalistic memories. Then come paintings in which he tackles the problem of the corners, which the centralized subject matter of Cubist compositions often left empty, learning to incorpo- rate them as integral to an overall pattern of small overlapping and interpenetrating polygonal planes. Sometimes an upper layer of irregular polygons, often bright yellows and greens, hovers over or pops out from the underlying ground of blacks, greys, purples and browns.

A number of his painting have no formal hierarchies, no dominant focal points, no excessive directionality, no gravitational pull, but an equal weighting of visual activity, the forms and colours harmonize on a unified surface. If indeed Jauran’s formal development proceeded in this way, then it traces a quick if not always straight path through the history of Cubism. His always discreet colour palette and his predilection for small and intricate forms also infuse his paintings with flavours from late Parisian Cubism.

Pieces by Artist

CAT. 1 Equilibrium, 1953 Oil on canvas 48 x 38.3 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of Michel and Martine Brossard in honour of the MMFA 150th anniversary (2010.517)

This was Jauran, first signed and dated painting, Équilibre (Equilibrium, 1953, CAT. 1)—executed on the coarse jute that his new wife, the journalist Françoise Stébenne, used for her curtains—here he joined his artistic destiny with Belzile, Jérôme and Toupin.

CAT. 3 The Magic Number, 1954 Oil on board 43 x 35.5 cm Private Collection

Le Chiffre magique (The Magic Number) is a monumental version of Jauran’s geometric compositions, tautly elegant, its discreet palette handsome and assured, its planarity reinforced by the overall texture of the rough side of the wood fibreboard panel on which it is executed. The pieces fit together like a geometer’s jigsaw puzzle so that there are now no formal hierarchies, no dominant focal points, no excessive directionality, no gravitational pull, but an equal weighting of visual activity.

CAT. 4 Untitled (No. 41), 1955 Oil on oilcloth 29.5 x 29.9 cm Collection Lavalin du Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (A 92 945 P 1)

Jauran’s still life is uncompromisingly flat with solid unmodulated colours, the effect underscored by the rough weave of the jute canvas. But Jauran’s hard-edged polygonal planes retain memories of jugs or decanters set out on a tabletop in a domestic interior, and gravity continues to exert its pull in a number of still life motifs (No. 40, c. 1953–54, NGC; No. 41, 1955, CAT. 4)

CAT. 5, p. 4 Untitled, 1955 Oil on board 62.9 x 59 cm Private Collection

An untitled 1955 painting (CAT. 5, P. 4) is different. It has no echoes of still life, is almost oblivious to the grid, is not about balancing intricate parts against one another or even interlocking them. Its geometry is eccentric but held together as if in a continuous parti-coloured pattern resembling, to draw an improbable analysis, the geometrized hide from a crossbreed of Guernsey and Holstein cows. Contradictory perspectival leads weirdly bend and buckle the space. The result is unexpected and provocative—as if a new approach to pictorial space was opening up whose fulfillment, because Jauran stopped painting in 1956, we would never see. Artist Biography

JEAN-PAUL JÉRÔME Jean -Paul escaped the Cubist grid. Much of Jérôme’s work from the Plasticien years was lost, making it difficult to follow his early development.25 A grainy film clip taken in his basement in 1956 shows, besides an early still life, a couple of small paintings made up of patterns of variable rectangles of discrete colours separated by interstices of white ground. They look quite conventionally composed and do not predict the eccentrics to come. Jérôme can be thoroughly capricious. In Untitled, 1955 (CAT. 8), he sets a cast of comic abstract figures marching across his canvas, their left side shaped like curvilinear Arpian biomorphs, their right side straightline geometric. If this has a model it might well be something like Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Échelonnement désaxé, 1934 (MoMA), a composition of a precariously teetering stack of silhouetted shapes, straight on their bottom edge and curved on top. The image was illustrated and available in various formats, and it is as if Jérôme had taken it, trimmed it on both sides and turned it 90 degrees. Jean-Paul Jérôme abandoned the Plasticien aesthetic around 1957 during his period in Paris, which was marked by the increasing influence of lyrical abstraction. At the end of his career, he returned to a complex and highly chromatic geometrical abstraction.

Pieces by Artist

CAT. 6 Untitled, 1955 Oil on canvas 76.8 x 92.3 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1992.288)

In Untitled from 1955 the component shapes do not so much interlock as jostle against one another. Nor are they so much discrete forms as oddly shaped vectors heading toward the sides and tops of the canvas. They overrun its edges rather than accommodate to them, quite overriding the more usual centrality of early Plasticien images.

CAT. 7* Untitled, 1955 Oil on canvas 92.5 x 76.2 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1992.290)

A grainy film clip taken in his basement in 1956 shows, besides an early still life, a couple of small paintings made up of patterns of variable rectangles of discrete colours separated by interstices of white ground. They look quite conventionally composed and do not predict the eccentrics to come.

CAT. 8 Untitled, 1955 Oil on burlap 91.5 x 76 cm Collection of Dr. William Marasovich

In Untitled, 1955 (CAT. 8), he sets a cast of comic abstract figures marching across his canvas, their left side shaped like curvilinear Arpian biomorphs, their right side straightline geometric. If this has a model it might well be something like Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Échelonnement désaxé, 1934 (MoMA), a composition of a precariously teetering stack of silhouetted shapes, straight on their bottom edge and curved on top. The image was illustrated and available in various formats, and it is as if Jérôme had taken it, trimmed it on both sides and turned it 90 degrees. Artist Biography

DENIS JUNEAU In 1954, while visiting the Carrara region in Italy to select marble for a traditional sculpture commission, he visited the Milan Triennial Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Modern Architecture. Inspired by the progressive spirit of contemporary design, he decided to stay, enrolling in the Centro Studi Arte Industria in Novara, Italy. He returned to Montreal in the fall of 1956 immersed in techniques of integrating art into the industrial environ- ment. Like the first Plasticiens, he was familiar with the ideas expressed in the journal Art d’aujourd’hui, which in 1956 reproduced one of his gouaches, Carré blanc (White Square). In his catalogue text in Art abstrait he spoke of the structural affinity between the problems that confronted the contemporary professional in industry and manage- ment and the linear and spatial problems that were the purview of pure plastic art. In the mid-1950s his work was a cross between Arp’s Surrealist biomorphs from the 1930s and Matisse’s more recent collages, executed in flat bright optimistic colours. His 1955 study for a publicity poster for Mobil Oil shares the same formal clarity and design assurance. He soon settled into a stricter geometric vocabulary based predominantly on circle motifs—whole, halved, quartered and differently sized. Denis Juneau pursued numerous pictorial investigations into optical effects and in-depth studies on colour transparency.

Pieces by Artist

CAT. 45 Untitled, 1955 Gouache on paper 36 x 63.5 cm Collection of Simon Blais

Juneau settled into a stricter geometric vocabulary based predominantly on circle motifs—whole, halved, quartered and differently sized. In a later interview he explained how “the circle presented itself to me as an ideal figure. As well as being the form most expressive of movement, the circle offered me the possibilities of unlimited transformation.”He laid out these circles, often organized in alignment with differently coloured orthogonal divisions of the canvas, in dynamic rhythmic relations across the picture surface. Even if they are ultimately Synthetic Cubist images—they are transformed in a way no first Plasticien would have dared, seen through the up-to-date lens of geometric design principles. In a way often evocative of collage, the forms are fully declared, the colours bright and efficient, the mood assured, even when queried, as it is by the menacing opaque black portal shape that grabs foreground attention in Untitled.

CAT. 46 Divided Circles, 1958 Oil on canvas 91.5 x 76.5 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, gift of Fernande Saint-Martin (2001.157)

CAT. 47 Untitled, 1958 Oil on board 124.5 x 84 cm Collection of Marc Bellemare

CAT. 48* Spatial Plane, 1959 Wood painted with oil 73 x 44.5 x 24 cm Private Collection

CAT. 76** White Square, 1956 Gouache on paper 37 x 71 cm Private Collection Artist Biography

FERNAND LEDUC If anyone fulfilled the original initiative of the first Plasticiens, it was the former Automa- tiste Fernand Leduc. Leduc could assimilate Jauran’s system of interpenetrating, finely tuned, if slightly ungainly geometries and then heighten them with robust colours.Luduc was a master with contrasts concerning, the meetings of tone, the juxtapositions of vibratory colours. Hu used a large range of colours with deep harmonies and sharp stridencies. Leduc’s reorientation to geometric abstraction took place during 1955, when he finally shed his demure attitude to colour (CAT. 15). In the course of that year, his painterly post-Automatiste “taches” quickly transmuted into translucent, soft-hued rectangular solids and then turned hard-edge, with fully saturated colour. Since 1970 Fernand Leduc has devoted himself to the creation of his Micro- chromies, quasi-monochromatic paintings steeped in a contemplative reflection on the essence and quality of light.

Pieces by Artist

CAT. 15 Equivalence, 1955 Oil on plywood 29 x 32.5 cm Collection Lavalin du Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (A 92 952 P 1)

Leduc’s reorientation to geometric abstraction took place during 1955, when he finally shed his demure attitude to colour. In the course of that year, his painterly post-Automatiste “taches” quickly transmuted into translucent, soft-hued rectangular solids and then turned hard-edge, with fully saturated colour.

CAT. 16 Geodesic Module, 1956 Oil on canvas 130.3 x 145.3 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, promised gift of the artist (DPD.2006.17)

In 1955 Leduc executed some strictly orthogonal compositions, but his preference was for dynamic structures with intersecting diagonals and sharp angles. Repentigny observed about Module géodésique (Geodesic Module), which Leduc showed in the first exhibition of the Non-figurative Artists’ Association of Montreal (NFAAM) in 1956,33 that its composition of juxtaposed shapes was essentially “plastici- enne.” Robert Ayre, writing in the Montreal Star in 1956 aptly described Leduc as a “geometrical abstractionist, precise, exact, measured, cutting out his shapes like scissors,” while perhaps not quite appreciating the paintings: “They have no more thickness than pieces of a puzzle; the pictures have no atmosphere, evoke no mood, even if they sometimes have poetic titles.”

CAT. 17 Crenellations, 1957 Oil on canvas 55 x 55 cm Collection of Rob and Sandra May

A quick comparison of his Créneaux (Crenella- tions, 1957, CAT. 17) with Jauran’s The Magic Number shows how closely Leduc could assimilate Jauran’s system of interpenetrating, finely tuned, if slightly ungainly geometries and then heighten them with robust colours. When Leduc showed his first Plasticien paintings in 1956, Jauran (as the critic Repentigny) wrote in La Presse, praising the “feast of colours, with deep harmonies and sharp stridencies” and remarking on “the assurance with which the contrasts, the meetings of tone, the juxtapositions of vibratory colours have been handled.”

CAT. 18 The Alpinist, 1957 Oil on canvas 201.5 x 111 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1962.162)

L’Alpiniste (The Alpinist); Solar Strata (1958, MMFA); Ville (City, 1959)—suggest underlying realistic subjects. These are the kinds of paintings he showed in Art abstrait, and they are among the grandest and most exuberant colour paintings of the last half of the decade. Artist Biography

GUIDO MOLINARI Molinari joined the future second Plasticiens, he had not been impressed by the Manifeste des Plasticiens or by the paintings of the first Plasticiens. The first Plasticiens did not naturally evolve into the second Plasticiens, but rather their two stories are separate, developing out of different backgrounds and with different destinies. He continued to operate somewhere within the European geometric abstraction tradition but with a critically focused sensibility. By 1961 and 1962 the Mondri- an-based balancing of part to part to whole within the confines of the framing edges of the canvas began to recede. As Molinari eliminated horizontals, the vertical bands lose something of their character as discrete, measured abstract shapes. The frame no longer so much cuts them to size at top and bottom as it simply limits how much of their extension we need to see. The eye, now worrying less about both formal and colour relationships, can pay more attention to colour itself, to how it unfolds as the eye scans the canvas, to how colour behaves and how colour is not constant but changes in response to what it lies next to. Throughout his career he continued to make gestural drawings, and toward the end of his life he revisited his earlier dialogue with Mondrian.

Pieces by Artist

CAT. 19 Red Angle, 1955 Oil on canvas 50.5 x 61 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (2004.416)

Red Angle, perhaps the most first-Plasticien of Molinari’s paintings, its roots in Cubism distant and long internalized, tautly flat and formally reduced, blunt and monumental. Molinari’s geometry wins out in this piece. It was his way of turning hard-edge is also a critique of the Plasticiens’ Parisian discretion. Red Angle’s large-scale boldness, despite its relatively small size, is an upping of the abstract ante, pointing to sterner historical sources, a nod especially to the Suprematist Malevich.

CAT. 20 Study for “Black Angle,” 1956 Automobile enamel paint on paper 52 x 66 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, purchase, made possible by Harold Lawson Bequest (Dr.1980.1)

Molinari’s shift had been initiated in a sequence of black and white ink drawings from 1955, still close to being tachist dabs, which then, whether worked out on paper or on canvas, became increasingly structured and by 1956 shed their paint body and resolved themselves into flat, simple eye-daunting geometries. Then, as we follow Molinari’s next steps, colour disappears, and we see the kind of work that he would show in his 1956 exhibition at L’Actuelle, the large-scale Black and White paintings with their hard-edge, utterly flat geometric structures. These may be strictly orthogonal compositions, but as often one or two of the dividing edges will be slightly askew (Quadriblanc, 1956,), quickening the visual energies between the black and white shapes (Black Diagonal). This is what matters here, and not some problem of balancing part to part across the surface of the painting. The black shapes, and the white ones, instead insist on their independent spatial equivalency, each vying to be the figure to the other’s ground, fighting for supremacy in the viewer’s eye. With this exhibition Molinari entered new personal territory.

CAT. 21 Binoir, 1955 Oil on canvas 60 x 75 cm Fondation Guido Molinari, Montreal

CAT. 22 Quadriblanc, 1956 Automobile enamel paint on canvas 118 x 127.5 cm Fondation Guido Molinari, Montreal

CAT. 23 Black Diagonal, 1956 Automobile enamel paint on canvas 127 x 152.6 cm Fondation Guido Molinari, Montreal

CAT. 29 Untitled, 1957 Ink on paper 66 x 101.6 cm Private Collection

For a while Molinari focused on drawing, using black and coloured inks or gouache on paper. His method was gesture, more Pollock-like than Automatiste, the lines and colours transversing the surface of the paper rather than carving out spaces in it. (It is worth remembering that Molinari continued to draw spontaneously throughout his life, that freehand execution and precise geometry were not contradictory for him but rather alternative means of expression.)

CAT. 30 Untitled, 1958 Gouache on paper 66.2 x 101.8 cm Collection of Galerie Roger Bellemare, Montreal

CAT. 31 Untitled, 1958 Automobile enamel paint on paper 65.7 x 101.5 cm Private Collection

CAT. 32 Multi-blanc, 1958 Aniline dye on canvas 87.6 x 113.7 cm Private Collection

In1958 Molinari revisited his Black and White paintings, this time not so explicitly pitting black masses against white ones but crossing his canvases with tilted grid-like patterns of often tapered black bands. The bands thus have their own built-in vectorial energy that is further intensified as they compete for pride of place with the white skewed polygons that push forward in between them.

CAT. 33 Untitled, 1959 Oil on canvas 81.5 x 66 cm Private Collection

In 1959 Molinari introduced colour into his Black and White paintings, always treating it boldly and luminously. If he favoured the primaries, it was not exclusively. If he composed, balancing vertical forms against horizontal ones, it was to continue a conversation with Mondrian. But verticality gained the upper hand, and so that when in the paintings he breaks up his upright bands horizontally, his smaller columnar chunks rise and fall restlessly, like elevators in exposed shafts.

CAT. 34 White Rectangle, 1959 Oil on canvas 84 x 94 cm Collection of Marc Bellemare

CAT. 35 Equilibrium, 1960 Acrylic on canvas 99 x 109.2 cm Private Collection

CAT. 49 Yellow-Red Asymmetrical, 1962 Acrylic on canvas 162.5 x 144.9 cm Collection of Christopher Varley, Toronto

Molinari’s introduction of seriality—constructing his compositions by systematically repeating the same sequence of colour bands—a method that became fundamental to the Stripe Paintings. In Asymetrique jaune-rouge (Yellow-Red), the colour sequence—yellow, red, blue—is doubled, with the effect that the appearance of its colours will change, or mutate, contingent on their placement within the larger chain. In Teyssèdre’s words, “mathematical symmetry falls into optical asymmetry.”

CAT. 50 Green-Red Mutation, 1964 Acrylic on canvas 201 x 244 cm Fondation Guido Molinari, Montreal

Molinari’s paintings transitioned from second Plasticien geometric abstraction to post-Plas- ticien chromatic abstraction. This is hown in his Stripe paintings, his signature body of work of the 1960s, whose core formal principles also define the 1960s painting of the other post-Plasticiens. Mutation vert-rouge (Green-Red Mutation). It is composed of eight equal-width vertical bands in three colours organized serially: brown, orange, green, brown, orange, green again, ending in brown, orange and no third green. The eye is cast backward to look for the missing green, all the while discovering new band combinations in twos or threes or fours in a potentially endless cycle. Inextricably involved in our rhythmic reading of the painting is how the colours change their quality and spatial location as we see them in different combinations and relationships

CAT. 51, p. 6 Orange-Blue Space, 1964 Acrylic on canvas 206 x 274.5 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, gift of Guy Molinari (2009.236)

Inextricably involved in our rhythmic reading of the painting is how the colours change their quality and spatial location as we see them in different combinations and relationships. We see the Stripe Paintings as Molinari has resolved them into their definitive structure: vertical colour bands of equal width, the colours ordered in serial relations. Green-Red Mutation and Sériel vertbleu (Green-Blue Serial) may play themselves out in a slow, stately manner, whereas others with narrower stripes act more rapidly (Untitled, 1967), and other colour choices will elicit different emotional responses. But the crux of Molinari’s research and observations about the behaviour of colour was that colour has no fixed identity, that its identity is always contingent on context—on the place and time of our looking at it.

CAT. 52 Configuration, 1966 Wood painted with acrylic 183.5 x 29 x 29 cm (each of the four elements) Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, gift of the artist (2004.421)

CAT. 53 Untitled, 1967 Acrylic on canvas 198.1 x 160 cm Private Collection, Toronto

CAT. 54 Green-Blue Serial, 1968 Acrylic on canvas 205.5 x 320 cm Fondation Guido Molinari, Montreal

Here we see the Stripe Paintings as Molinari has resolved them into their definitive structure: vertical colour bands of equal width, the colours ordered in serial relations. Inextricably involved in our rhythmic reading of the painting is how the colours change their quality and spatial location as we see them in different combinations and relationships. We see the Stripe Paintings as Molinari has resolved them into their definitive structure: vertical colour bands of equal width, the colours ordered in serial relations. Green-Red Mutation and Sériel vertbleu (Green-Blue Serial) may play themselves out in a slow, stately manner, whereas others with narrower stripes act more rapidly (Untitled, 1967), and other colour choices will elicit different emotional responses. But the crux of Molinari’s research and observations about the behaviour of colour was that colour has no fixed identity, that its identity is always contingent on context—on the place and time of our looking at it.

CAT. 79** Black and White, 1956–57 Automobile enamel paint on paper 65.7 x 101.5 cm Private Collection

CAT. 80** Untitled, 1957–58 Coloured ink on paper 51 x 66 cm Private Collection

CAT. 81** Untitled, 1958 Automobile enamel paint on paper 51 x 66 cm Private Collection Artist Biography

FERNAND TOUPIN Toupin is, of course, directly indebted to Mondrian in his horizontal and vertical linear devices, and when he shapes his panels into irregular polygons he makes his cuts in relation to internal compositional structures, always in pursuit of formal equilibrium, balancing out unequal parts. As such, his paintings have little to do with the so-called deductive “shaped canvas” of Minimalism and Post-Painterly Abstraction of a few years later. Toupin was, however, quite personal in his choice of colours. If the grounds are white, the bands of colour that cross them may include blues and very non-Neo-Plasticist shades of brown. In the mid 1950s he started to work with irregular shaped canvases but by 1957 resumed the rectangular canvas with Structure en rouge, performing other transgressions of the Neo-Plasticist purities, with personal colour choices, irregular and often curvilinear geometries, and networks of black lines that have life independent of the shapes they originally set out to define. Fernand Toupin devoted himself to matièristes works, built on granulations and impastos; in his final work, he returned to a Plasticien geometry with fragmented areas.

Pieces by Artist

CAT. 2 Deployed Forms, 1954 Oil on board 91.5 x 76.6 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase. Conservation made possible by a contribution from the Amis du MNBAQ (1990.279)

CAT. 12 Untitled, 1956 Oil on board 118.5 x 58.5 cm Private Collection

When Toupin showed irregular-format paintings at the Galerie L’Actuelle in February 1956, he came closest among the first Plasticiens to accentuate the objectness of his paintings. Repentigny greeted them with enthusiasm, regarding their break with the regular conventions of the rectangle as a significant step toward the further integration of painting into the ambience of the wall. He called the paintings “tableaux-objets,” perhaps borrowing the term from the French Neo-Plasticist Felix Del Marle, who had used it in a 1949 letter to Jean Gorin republished in Art d’aujourd’hui in 1953, describing his desire to more closely unify the art object into its architectural ensemble.

CAT. 13 Surface with Directing Red, 1956 Oil on board 107 x 65 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, purchase, made possible by the MMFA Volunteer Association Fund (1995.16)

Toupin was quite personal in his choice of colours. If the grounds are white, the bands of colour that cross them may include blues and very non-Neo-Plasticist shades of brown. Another variation, whose picture plane he subdivides into a geometric helter-skelter pattern of colour stripes, complicates matters with proto–Op art results (Aire avec rouge directeur (Surface with Directing Red) .

CAT. 14 Structure in Red, 1958 Oil on canvas 76.4 x 61.2 cm Collection Lavalin du Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (A 92 510 P 1)

Toupin resumes the rectangular canvas with Structure en rouge from the previous year with (Structure in Red), performing other transgressions of the Neo-Plasticist purities, with personal colour choices, irregular and often curvilinear geometries, and networks of black lines that have life independent of the shapes they originally set out to define. Artist Biography

CLAUDE TOUSIGNANT Neither of the future second Plasticiens, Tousignant or Molinari, had been much impressed by the Manifeste des Plasticiens or by the paintings of the first Plasticiens. Tousignant thought the manifesto largely puerile and reactionary, and found the painting overly influenced by French geometric abstraction. Both Tousignant and Molinari were students at the School of Art and Design at the MMFA, Tousignant from 1948 to 1951, and Molinari during 1951 and 1952 after a stint at the École des beaux-arts. Tousignant departed for Paris in late 1951 full of romantic notions, fed by the magazines he read, about the Parisian art scene. During his five-month stay he frequented the galleries and museums but, except for the paintings of Hans Hartung and recent work of Matisse, found nothing particularly challenging in the new art that he saw. Back in Montreal he abandoned painting for a while, regaining his enthusiasm only when a chance meeting in the street with Molinari in spring 1954 which led him to see La Matière chante, the exhibition that inspired him to resume his work with abstraction. Claude Tousignant continues his investigations into the nature of the coloured surface or painted object in all its depths; most recently, he focused on the contextualization of his creations in a gallery space.

Pieces by Artist

CAT. 24 Untitled, 1956 Watercolour on card 17.5 x 14 cm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, gift of the artist in 1993 (37192)

Tousignant had been especially impressed by the Sam Francis painting Abstraction, 1954 (MMFA), shown at L’Actuelle inearly 1956. Tousignant first tried out its general format in this preliminary watercolour, and then translated that into the large-scale Frontal, 1956 (NGC). In the process he turned it loosely geometric, flattened it and neutralized its tachist pattern into a single transparent veil of blue, bordered by a comparably simple band of yellow. Just as transformative as any formal reductions, however, was Tousignant’s choice to execute the painting in automobile enamel, the new material that he and Molinari were experimenting with because of its luminosity.

CAT. 25** Untitled, 1956 Automobile enamel paint on paper 43.2 x 55.8 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase with funds from an anonymous donor (2000.98)

Tousignant made a number of works on paper with automobile enamel, which are bluntly frontal with a logo-like candour that also serves to shut out the lingering Cubism still haunting the first Plasticiens. In these drawings the edges are hand-drawn, but when Tousignant turned them into the paintings that he showed at L’Actuelle in June, he used masking tape to define edges that are sharp and straight. Tousignant did not shy away from colour, taking full advantage of the new range of brilliant hues offered by car paints.46 For Frontal he used the product Cilco, which dries to a dull sheen, brushing it on regularly in a vertical direction, leaving a variable covering open to lyrical spatial allusions.

CAT. 26 Untitled No. 8, 1956 Automobile enamel paint on card 42.8 x 54.8 cm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchase in 2000 (40356)

CAT. 27 Affirmations, 1956 Automobile enamel paint on canvas 128.8 x 116.8 cm On loan from the artist, Montreal

In making L’Actuelle paintings—Hypnose (Hypnosis, 1956) and Les Affirmations (Affirmations, 1956)—Tousignant used a roller, eliminating any trace of the brushstrokes. For these Tousignant used Cilux, which dried to a high gloss, achieving a planar surface that looks “in-your-face” hard, shiny and resilient.. The curator Denise Leclerc has remarked on how Tousignant deliberately did not frame these works, thus drawing attention to the thickness of their stretcher support and to the literal fact of their three-dimensionality.

CAT. 28 Hypnosis, 1956 Automobile enamel paint on canvas 149.8 x 128.7 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, purchase, made possible by the MMFA Volunteer Association Fund (1994.6)

CAT. 36 Untitled, 1958 Gouache and ink on paper 24.1 x 30.4 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase with funds from an anonymous donor (2000.108)

Tousignant never abandoned colour. In the later 1950s, he exploited the diagonal as a compositional device, using it to divide his canvases into a variety of trapezoidal shapes that push out against one another, barely allowing themselves to be contained by the edges of the frame.

CAT. 37 Red Polygon, 1958 Leather dye on canvas 43.7 x 56.7 cm On loan from the artist, Montreal

CAT. 38 The Black Polygon, 1958 Leather dye on linen 56.5 x 59.1 cm Private Collection

CAT. 39 Yellow Verticals, 1958 (recreated in 1969) Acrylic on canvas 243.5 x 122 cm On loan from the artist, Montreal

A climactic achievement of explointing the diagonal as a compositional device is Verticales jaunes (Yellow Verticals). Its simplified inverted-fan composition simultane- ously pushing outward and pulling inward in a double play of centripetal and centrifugal forces. The painting originally was designed to stand on the floor and lean against the wall—the 1958 version was executed on a standard 8 by 4 foot sheet of half-inch plywood— foreshadowing Tousignant’s later cultivation of the objectness over the pictorialness of painting. When he showed it in the exhibition Art abstrait in 1959, it was properly installed for the opening of the show, but the exhibitors, fearing damage—and in defiance of the artist’s wishes—soon hung it on the wall in the traditionalway.

CAT. 40 The Yellow Line, 1959 Acrylic on canvas 144.9 x 131.8 cm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchase in 1969 (15781)

Tousignant was adept at painting bands; in La Ligne jaune (The Yellow Line), he flipped them horizontal, rendering them in glorious sun-lit colours, almost as if to evoke the landscape and stress test his otherwise resolute commitment to abstraction.

CAT. 41 Spatial, 1960 Plywood painted with acrylic 121.9 x 61 x 45.7 cm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, gift of the artist in 1993 (37193)

Tousignant worked on series of reliefs and bold, open sculptural constructions clearly executed under the influence of the Neo-Plas- ticist tradition.

CAT. 55 The Yellow Square, 1963 Acrylic on canvas 172.7 x 193.3 cm Private Collection

A series of paintings from the early 1960s focused on fields of colour, usually held within a single off-centre rectangle that fills the canvas except for narrow framing devices. Le Carreau jaune (The Yellow Square) counterbal- ances its yellow square with a pencil-fine line that is actually drawn by sewing together two pieces of canvas. They are an openly expansive feel for colour. They resume something of the singularity of the 1956 automobile enamel paintings but not their brusqueness, taking quieter pleasure in the sheer immediacy of these fields of pure hue.

CAT. 56 Bull’s Eye No. 2, 1964 172.7 x 172.7 cm Acrylic on canvas On loan from the artist, Montreal

In his first group of bull’s-eye paintings from 1964 and 1965 (CAT. 56), the circular bands of colour are inscribed inside rectangular formats from whose centres they radiate outward like the ripples on a pond. Sometimes there were just two alternating, optically pulsating colours of a single bandwidth. Others, with a more complicated colour structure and multiple bands, may at first glance appear to move in regular sequence, or serially, as Molinari’s do. In these paintings the viewer will intuit the presence of a structural order, one that provides a continual and necessary visual anchor, but to actually parse it out defies empirical analysis.

CAT. 57 Stochastic in Green, 1965 Acrylic on canvas 112 x 224 cm McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, gift of ICI Canada Inc. (1995.19.56)

Stochastique en vert (Stochastic in Green) reflects Tousignant’s interest in avant-garde music. Here the title refers to the compositional techniques of the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), who pioneered the use of mathematical models in music. Tousignant’s compositions are characterized by rhythmic movement that seems to be continuously generated and regenerated, overlapping the confines of the rectangle but at the same time held in check and turned back inward by the frame of the rectangle. In stretched rectangles, like that of Stochastic in Green, outward movement proceeds with some speed until the outlying arcs of the truncated circles stretch out more and more, gradually flattening and slowing the eye.

CAT. 58 Gong 72, 1966 Acrylic on canvas 182.8 cm (diam.) On loan from the artist, Montreal

The Gongs, a series of twenty or more from 1966 interweave the deeper sonorous reverberations of their wide bands with the pings of the busy little circles into which the wide bands are regularly subdivided, all of this further enriched by optical mixes between the different colours of the wide “ground” bands and of the narrow circles spinning inside them.

CAT. 59, p. 9 Chromatic Accelerator, 1968 Acrylic on canvas 243.8 cm (diam.) On loan from the artist, Montreal

In the Accélérateurs chromatiques (Chromatic Accelerators, CAT. 59, P. 9), the largest group, which dates from 1967 to 1969, Tousignant posed yet more intricately organized but thoroughly controlled internal colour and structural relationships, exploring the permutations of a succession of particular chromatic series. He uses a maximum of seven colours, exploring their tonal and chromatic quality as well as their function in the series. The number of elements and their spatial organization are determined by the dimensions of the format

CAT. 60 Latin Circle, 1969 Acrylic on canvas 243.8 cm (diam.) Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, purchase, made possible by a Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest (1969.1632)

Cercle latin (Latin Circle, 1969, CAT. 60), painted near the end of his work with the target format paintings, is especially magisterial and invigorating.Its dazzling Day-Glo colours—there are four of them repeated three times, except for the last green, in different orders—indeed generate afterimages, but colours do not so much pulsate as they confidently breathe. And while the blue disk at the painting’s centre may initially grab the eye and send it skipping outward, events slow and calm down until the peripheral orange band holds the whole together as if it were a self-defining universe.

CAT. 77** Untitled, 1956 Automobile enamel paint on paper 28 x 43 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase with funds from an anonymous donor (2000.97)

CAT. 78** Untitled, 1958–59 Gouache and ink on paper 12.8 x 20.2 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchased with funds from an anonymous donor (2000.111)

HORS CATALOGUE, p. 160 Chromatic Accelerator 64, 1967 Acrylic on canvas 162.3 cm (diam.) Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec, purchase, Concours artistiques du Québec (1968.18) Pieces by Artist CAT. 9 Untitled, 1955 Oil on board 73.2 x 31.5 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1992.289)

This piece uses the rhomboid format with miniaturist Paul Klee–like jauntiness. Its soft-edged squares and rectangles are flat, on the surface and playfully dispersed. Artist Biography

Neither of the future second Plasticiens, Tousignant or Molinari, had been much impressed by the Manifeste des Plasticiens or by the paintings of the first Plasticiens.