Signatory of Global denial, painter in the wake of the Automatists spearheaded by Paul-Émile Borduas, became a television director and then author of successful soap operas, Pierre Gauvreau reached the century posthumously on August 23. The public immediately remembers several of his soap operas, starting with the soap operas The time of a peace and Cormorant.
In Gauvreau or the obligation of freedom (2001), a film directed by Charles Binamé, the artist can be summed up in a few words: “I was born in 1922, in Montreal, at the corner of Saint-Denis and Sherbrooke. Three years after my birth, I had a little brother, who was named Claude and who was going to make a name for himself, he, later too, and then at the same time I lost my father. […] I don’t know the details, but when my brother was born, he left. So I lived in a fairly free context. Especially since my mother and her father were atheists. And that, on his side, I descended from people who had played a role during the revolt of 1837.” This attachment to a revolutionary world, Pierre Gauvreau will often evoke.
Undisciplined, at least in the eyes of the Jesuits, he was expelled from the College Sainte-Marie. “I was home for a year, not knowing what to do, and I drew, drew, drew. Under the influence of Picasso, Matisse. Among the people who attend the literary evenings organized by his mother, there is René Chicoine, a painter who teaches at the School of Fine Arts. After looking at his drawings, he advised his mother to send him to the École des beaux-arts, rue Sherbrooke. There, Gauvreau met Louise Renaud and Françoise Sullivan. With them, later, he will sign the manifesto Global denial.
A new era
In 1943, an antifascist, he volunteered in the army and became an infantry officer. Even soldier, recalls Janine Carreau, his companion, he continues to paint. Back in America, in August 1946, under the influence of Paul-Émile Borduas and the painting of predecessors like Matisse, Picasso and Braque, he painted a first non-figurative painting entitled Light, grave, yellow, thirsty drive. This painting is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
The eldest of the Gauvreaus produced, in the effervescence of the immediate post-war period, inks and oils that now belong to major collections. He meets the painter Jean Paul Riopelle. He also befriends Maurice Perron, a photographer with a sure eye. Everyone sees each other, socializes, discusses, exhibits together, draws up plans for the future. In 1948 appears Global denial published by Mithra-Mythe. The catalog of this house will include only one other title of Borduas, Liberating projectionsas well as The burnt virgin of the poet Paul-Marie Lapointe.
It has often been said that the manifesto Global denial, which has just reappeared with the French publisher Allia, anticipated the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. However, a careful rereading leaves doubtful as to the will of the signatories to bring about technocratic and national reforms which were clearly at a good distance from their concerns. The signatories actually call for a new era that goes beyond the announcement of the end of a Judeo-Christian world. They present the society of 1948 as the result of a “little people tightly bound to cassocks which remained the only repositories of faith, knowledge, truth and national wealth”, and thus kept on the margins of “the ‘universal evolution’ from which they intend to extract themselves.
“We are going to live”
The manifesto, printed in 400 copies, is in line with the surrealists. However, his inspiration mixes with other influences. According to Pierre Gauvreau, part of this influence is based on a book by psychoanalyst Pierre Mabille, Egregores or the life of civilizations, written in 1936, that is to say at a time when the world was reeling from the Spanish Civil War. For Pierre Gauvreau in any case, “ Global refusal, it meant: “It’s going to be crazy, It’s going to do all your bullshit, Christ, we’re going to live!”
In 1950, it was somewhat by chance, after having been hired as an “announcer” at the CHLP radio station, that Pierre Gauvreau undertook a formidable rise in the media. He will produce several television programs for Radio-Canada, including Pepinot and Capucine, Radisson and Street the cove. It is he who leads the complex production D’Ibervillea major historical series, Radio-Canada’s first color series.
At the National Film Board (ONF), he became director of French production. In 1972, at only 50 years old, he resigned to return to creation: painting and writing. He returned to Radio-Québec to produce educational series. Then, from 1979 to 1998, he devoted himself, in addition to painting, to writing a teleromantic trilogy that left its mark on his society: Time of a peace (1980-1986), Cormorant (1990-1993) and The Quiet Volcano (1997-1998). Pierre Gauvreau died in Montreal in 2011.