Some Years After2

Note: this is the penultimate version of what would become the final chapter for the translation of Egregore. It was revised for the translation. A FEW YEARS LATER The English edition of this book appeared in 1993, and one of the things it tried to do was avoid relegating the signatories of Refus global to the past; to give some account of the work they had been doing in their various disciplines, and of critical commentary received, up to about 1990. That approach was appreciated by the artists, and I believe needs to be continued here. Obviously, a great deal has happened to the remaining signatories of Refus global in a dozen years, and much new, important research and publication has been done on the Automatist movement. What follows is a brief account of some recent developments.1 The bibliography of this French-language edition has been updated to reflect events, exhibitions, and new research, though it does not pretend to be exhaustive. FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY August 1998 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Refus global, with the anniversary sparking a great deal of interest in Québec and a burst of activity on the part of cultural agencies, galleries, writers and publishers eager to plan events and bring out books at or near the date. A major federal stimulus was the issue of a set of commemorative stamps reproducing works by Marcel Barbeau, Paul-Émile Borduas, Marcelle Ferron, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, and Jean-Paul Riopelle (excluding Françoise Sullivan, 1 presumably because her current reputation as a visual artist was not established in 1948, when she was devoting herself to dance). This commemoration prompted exhibitions in Hull at the Musée de la poste, as well as in Paris (Centre culturel canadien), London (Canada House), and Washington (Canadian Embassy). It was even acknowledged by a colour spread in the Toronto Star.2 2 As for other activities generated by the anniversary of the publication of Refus global, we might start with what could have been the major event of the year: the exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art entitled Borduas et l’épopée automatiste. Unfortunately, it turned out to be anything but an epic adventure. It was based entirely on the Museum’s collection, heavily weighted towards Borduas, with little or no attempt to seek works outside.3 Certain artists, such as Marcelle Ferron and Jean- Paul Mousseau were badly represented. There was a whole room documenting the restoration of cracking paint on some Borduas canvases, but there was not a single work, early or late, by Françoise Sullivan -- only the famous photos by Maurice Perron of her dance in snow. The Museum didn’t seem to realize that, although interest in the manifesto and the movement has in the past tended to centre upon Borduas (so much so that the first English translations of Refus global only included Borduas’ texts and ignored the other four contributors, whose work amounted to more than half the total volume), there is a strong movement among historians to change the focus and give more prominence to other signatories. This reality was not lost on the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir, which published a spread of 24 full pages, with articles by a variety of academics and journalists coming at the phenomenon from a variety of angles, with at least some recognition of everyone involved, and with plenty of illustrations. Nor was this change in critical direction ignored by the cultural review Spirale, whose “Dossier” section gave a multi-disciplinary and contextual account of the impact of the Automatist manifesto and of the anniversary events surrounding it.4 The little museum at Mont-Saint-Hilaire, the village which was home to Borduas for many years, mounted an exhibition in the summer of 1997 entitled Saint-Hilaire et les 3 automatistes, publishing a well-produced, small catalogue with a few colour illustrations of paintings, some “new” archival photographs of Borduas and family, and essentially biographico-geographical essays by Gilles Lapointe and François-Marc Gagnon. The exhibition showed not only retrospective works, but recent creations, including works by Janine Carreau (herself younger than the manifesto) inspired by the automatist poet Claude Gauvreau. This was followed in May of 1998 by a second exhibition, Éternel présent -- 50 ans après Refus global which again showed large, up-to-the-minute works and printed a luxury catalogue. In addition to this activity in Saint-Hilaire, there were widely dispersed exhibitions devoted to individual artists (a kind of compensation for the limited coverage of national and provincial galleries). Most, if not all, of the painters of the group had an individual show somewhere during 1998.5 In December, the Musée du Québec in Québec City opened an important show of the photographs of Maurice Perron, whose pictures of the group and their works from the early forties became the major image-bank of Automatism. The catalogue produced for this exhibition, entitled Maurice Perron photographies, includes large reproductions of more than 100 striking pictures, among them, of course, the “classics”, but also many that have not been in circulation before. Also published in 1998 was a collection of about 50 photographs by Paul-Emile Borduas, who is not known as a photographer and was apparently not proud of this work since he never talked about photography, even with Maurice Perron. The photographs were taken as part of a documentation of life in the Gaspé, sponsored by the Québec government in 1938. Gilles Lapointe situates this assignment in the debates over modernism and cultural conservation going on at the 4 École du meuble, where Borduas worked at the time. Lapointe does not argue for the great aesthetic value of the images (there are about 800 in total) but remarks on the qualities of detachment in the landscapes, the relative lack of human subjects, the emphasis on contrasts of light and dark. He also points out that, almost immediately after this summer of 1938, Borduas seems to have turned his back on the sentimental celebration of rural Québec, looking instead towards international art and Surrealism.6 In the Fall of 1998, there was a month-long, highly successful run of Claude Gauvreau’s play, Les Oranges sont vertes, which is in part a fictionalization of his relationship with the Automatist group. In 1994, the Théâtre d'aujourd'hui presented La Reprise, and 1996 had seen a production of the opera Le vampire et la nymphomane, based on a libretto Gauvreau wrote in 1949. Previously, there had been two stage productions and a ninety-minute television version of his best-known play, La charge de l'orignal épormyable. These were major productions, by major companies and major directors such as Michèle Magny and Lorraine Pintal, with some of Québec's most brilliant actors, all stimulated by the intensity, and probably also by the difficulty, of the work. The most recent production of Gauvreau by Lorraine Pintal was in 2004, with the very challenging L'Asile de la pureté, which actually had a first reading in the hospital where Gauvreau had been interned. The stage production attracted much attention and large audiences, many of them young people, and yet all this activity has aroused little or no interest in Gauvreau's theatre outside Québec, a fact that remains a great mystery and a great disappointment to me. Perhaps the situation will be helped by some important changes in the publication of Claude Gauvreau's work, as smaller and more accessible 5 editions (see bibliography) now supplement the 1500-page Oeuvres créatrices complètes of 1971. The anniversary also stimulated a number of lecture series and round-table discussions devoted to Automatism, mostly in Montréal and Ottawa, as well as academic conferences and events. Notable were a conference in Montréal whose acts were published as L’automatisme en mouvement , and another entitled Les automatistes à Paris, which coincided with a retrospective exhibition of paintings and documents at the Centre culturel canadien in Paris.7 The former included a cross-disciplinary set of papers by many of the best know experts on the movement, as well as a number of previously unpublished, very useful documents, particularly letters, by signatories of Refus global; the latter included a fascinating account by Ninon Gauthier of the difficulties that French impresario Charles Delloye faced when trying to mount exhibitions in Europe of Borduas and the Automatists, most of the trouble coming from Robert Élie. There were also some useful reprints of historical documents published with the acts of the Paris conference. And at York University in Toronto, there was a colloquium with academic papers as well as round-table discussions involving Pierre Gauvreau, Jeanne Renaud, Françoise Sullivan, Janine Carreau, R. Murray Schafer and others; with slide shows of artworks and films or videos showing dances choreographed by Jeanne Renaud and Françoise Riopelle; and a concluding night of performances including dances of Françoise Sullivan performed by the York Dance Ensemble and by Ginette Boutin, readings of poems by Claude Gauvreau and Thérèse Renaud, and even a musical setting of Gauvreau's Jappements à la lune, composed by Christopher Butterfield, sung by Fides Krucker, and 6 played by the Contemporary Music Ensemble of the University of Toronto, under Gary Kulesha.8 Not surprisingly, with all this celebration of Automatism going on in Montréal and elsewhere, there were signs of reaction. The most amusing was a little pamphlet, with illustrations of art works, entitled “Cent cibles,” published by art students at l’UQAM on August 9, 1998, inviting people to come to their fiftieth anniversary in 2048. Parodying the Automatist manifesto, it contains a section of definitions from Z to A, including this of Refus global: “Nausée authentique.

Load more