One day, when he was going through a difficult period in Paris, the painter Paul-Émile Borduas was descending the stairs of the Louvre when he met a dashing young Jean-Paul Riopelle, 17 years his junior, who was climbing the rungs. The two men barely spoke to each other.
The anecdote was told on Wednesday by Jean-Luc Murray, the director of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec (MNBAQ), on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Latent energies. Paul-Émile Borduas in the present. It illustrates a little how Borduas, initiator of the manifesto Global denialhas paved the way for many artists, without necessarily sharing their international fame.
“Riopelle had difficulty with the somewhat paternalistic approach of a master with his students,” remarks the museum’s curator of modern art, Anne-Marie Bouchard. “When you are a young artist, like Jean-Paul Riopelle at the time, you perhaps need to free yourself from this figure, who was an important figure, just like Ozias Leduc was able to be for Bordeaux at the time. You have to kill the father to be able to free yourself. »
An enhanced collection
With the donation to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec of eight paintings from their personal collection, Vancouver patrons and collectors Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa hope to promote the work of Paul-Émile Borduas.
In the exhibition, there are black and white paintings, very evocative of the late periods of the production of the Hilairemontais painter.
Until now, the institution had only 21 paintings by Borduas, yet one of the artists who had the most influence on the development of modern art in Quebec. Moreover, most of these works were of small format, and were produced in the 1940s, even before the signature of Global denial. With notably Schematic figuresa large black and white format from 1957, the museum is updating its collection.
“We believe that the movement automatists in the late 1940s was a worldwide breakthrough in artistic creation. We believe it is one of the most important artistic movements of the XXand century, well ahead of artists from the rest of Canada at the time,” said Michael J. Audain, who was at the MNBAQ on Wednesday. “They are attached to the surrealist movement of Paris, and to the abstract expressionists of New York. »
Remember that the museum is due to inaugurate the new Riopelle wing in 2025, where Borduas’ paintings will be housed.
Bordeaux in 2022
To show the strength of Paul-Émile Borduas’ thought, curator Anne-Marie Bouchard has combined the works in the collection with the present, juxtaposing them with those of today’s artists who share his audacity, his determination, and his perception of an art that makes things happen, of a politically engaged art. “Paul-Émile Borduas was the first, in the 1940s, to challenge academicism, to explore new pictorial experiments and to claim absolute freedom of creation”, notes Jean-Luc Murray.
This is how his works rub shoulders with those of contemporary artists Nadia Myre, Dominique Blain, Michel Campeau, Michaëlle Sergile and Alain Paiement. These are works that speak, among other things, of the Indian Act of 1876, colonialism and decolonialism, the crumbling memory, nature and time.
“Borduas studied political science, literature, history. It is relevant for Global denial, which speaks of an era beyond art itself, because it’s not just an artistic manifesto,” emphasizes Anne-Marie Bouchard. “But maybe the younger generations have heard less about it. »
However, it is precisely Paul-Émile Borduas’s “news of thought” that we wanted to stage here. “I have always had the feeling that his thought does not age, nor does his painting, and that his reflections on humanity remain deeply current. So it’s not difficult to put it in relation to current art,” continues Mme Bouchard.
Thus, the exhibition opens with an installation by Alain Paiement which brings together thousands of black and white photos of the ice taken under the Quebec Bridge to form a huge image scrolling from right to left, and which is inspired by the quote: “Time does not pass, we pass. » Further on, we find the fresco Indian Actby Nadia Myre, where the sentences of the Indian Act are covered with beadwork, in white on a red background.
Our journalist stayed in Quebec at the invitation of the MNBAQ.