We will celebrate during the next year the 75e birthday Global denial, this famous manifesto written by Paul-Émile Borduas, published in 1948 and co-signed by 15 artists known as the Automatistes. We will simultaneously celebrate the 100e anniversary of the birth of Jean Paul Riopelle, undoubtedly the most illustrious of the signatories of Global denial. Tributes and historical capsules will follow one another and will not fail to capture the attention of younger generations. It will be a beautiful moment of reappropriation of a part of our history. The only downside to mention in this concert of well-deserved praise is that it will once again overshadow the works and efforts of certain lesser-known thinkers and artists who have nevertheless paved the way.
More humble and discreet, indeed, the anniversary that we could easily miss and without which, in many respects, Global denial would have been hard to imagine is the 80e of the publication of “ Plea in favor of abstract art”, by the philosopher François Hertel (1905-1985). Published in November 1942 in the magazine French Americasix years before Global denialthis plea is considered the first theoretical text in favor of Quebec abstract art.
François Hertel, whose real name is Rodolphe Dubé, was both a free thinker and a Jesuit father, a contradiction in the terms he assumed until the break-up in 1943, the year he was forced to leave orders. He then tried to rebuild his life in France as a foreign journalist, but the trauma of exile is palpable: the creative impulse suffered. Hertel will however have been, at the end of his life, the author of about forty works in various styles (poetry, novels, essays, theater, stories), all absolutely impossible to find today in bookstores.
In 1942, when he wrote his “Plaidoyer”, Hertel was at the height of his Quebec career. Here is what he says about abstract art, thus beginning the reflections that will lead to Global denial : first — which has become obvious to us, but which was not so at the time — that “art has the right to be abstract”. Hertel understands “by abstraction the personal effort to project outside a singular born of the spirit and which is accountable only to the particular spirit which gave birth to it”. In other words, art is not obliged to “represent the real world”, it can defy conventions by expressing a singularity irreducible to common references, it does not have to justify itself.
Born from a “violently personal” approach, abstract art “stops being hypnotized on the outside to penetrate inside”. If he transmits the outside world, it is through internalized, imagined elements: “he submits known rhythms to his own rhythm”. The artist of abstraction, Hertel tells us, has somehow “liberated himself[é] of literature” (that is, of the need to represent and justify): “his familiar monsters […] may have no equivalent for the gaze of others”, in any case, he “does not seek to specify the relationships, [il ne] do not dream of representing.
Hence the difficulty of theorizing (other than approximately) abstract art. The horizon towards which abstract art rather tends is the “fixation of the dream” of an artist who is always unique, which ultimately remains “in part, ineffable and incommunicable”.
François Hertel has indeed paved the way for the reception of abstract art in Quebec: as a teacher at Brébeuf, he took his students to artists’ studios, he participated in selection juries alongside Maurice Gagnon, Fernand Leduc and Borduas. He adored Alfred Pellan, whom he had asked to illustrate the cover page of his novel Anatole Laplante, curious manin 1944.
Hertel went for anything that was new or that went against current tastes. Let us not be, he said, the “despisers of the time when [nous vivons] let’s keep an open mind to what’s to come. This is the message that inspired the Quiet Revolution, but which is too often reduced to Global denialwhich is a pity, especially in this month of November of the 80e anniversary of “Advocating for Abstract Art”.