The other day, I went to visit Madeleine Arbour. Just before its centenary, celebrated last Friday. Her son, Martin Gauvreau, had invited me to accompany him for the big event, stretched upstream and downstream in a residence in L’Île-Perrot, where she lived for a long time in a beautiful stone house.
In his bedroom, a weathervane in the shape of a European rooster was exhibited alongside small paintings by Riopelle and other treasures from his career. I had come to thank the one who encouraged so many women to follow their path without listening to opinions around. We sang songs from the folk repertoire and tunes by Piaf or Trenet. Time paused.
On his face, I saw his career scroll. This woman, painter, stylist, window dresser, was a great interior decorator and industrial designer. It was she who showed the children how to create wonders with three toothpicks and two pieces of cardboard. The surprise box. Columnist at woman of today, set and costume designer for the Rideau Vert and Compagnie Jean-Duceppe. Add his design courses given at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal. Badly paid because without a diploma, but crazy about transmission, she invited her students to be curious about everything, from their corner of the earth as well as from the whole world.
Madeleine Arbor knew poverty, paternal abandonment, but never ignorance. She had character and believed in her star. Self-taught who had to leave school at 15, passionate, jack-of-all-trades, environmentalist before the letter, the pioneering artist inspired me and I always crossed her path with pleasure. I loved his sparkling eyes, his simplicity, his ability to jump laughing from one discipline to another. And hadn’t she co-signed the famous manifesto Global denial in 1948, a breath of fresh air offered to Quebecers in full Duplessism, under the boos of right-thinking people?
When I was 17, this mischievous lady, who came to sit in a bar in Old Quebec, told us how she stole roosters from steeples and roadside crosses. His great friend Jean-Paul Riopelle (he called her his sister) presided over this select club of highway robbers. In fact, their goal was noble: to save these weather vanes from the rapacity of American antique dealers who were grabbing hold of our heritage for three cents. She would then offer these wood and metal gallinaceans to museums. But, at the time, we had the impression of receiving the secrets of a high-flying delinquent, watched with our round eyes. And at Expo 67, hadn’t she signed the famous mural tapestry of the Le Buffet cafeteria in the Canada pavilion? It impressed us.
As March 8 approaches, International Women’s Day, I think of those who broke the slabs before our steps. These women signatories of Global denial, among others. Alongside Madeleine Arbour, dancer and choreographer Françoise Sullivan, bon pied, bon oeil, is also a centenarian. Muriel Guilbault, the actress and muse of Claude Gauvreau, will have committed suicide in full youth. The painter Marcelle Ferron, with the large windows, Louise Renaud, painter, dancer and lighting designer, her writer sister Thérèse Renaud, the dancer Françoise Riopelle are no longer with us. But they float somewhere with their legacies, their regrets, their prides, without the glass ceilings that they brought down.
We owe a lot to these women who came to infiltrate the boys’ club by Paul-Émile Borduas without being the star, in the face of social prejudice against emancipated ladies. Many will have had children, sometimes barouetted, sometimes pampered. Some put their careers on hold. Madeleine Arbour, who was the companion of Pierre Gauvreau (the father of her children), waltzed with multitasking more easily than others. His memories stick to those of leading artists, automatists or not, between Montreal, New York and Paris, including the American sculptor Alexander Calder. Her committed woman’s hat suited her well too.
In 1965, Madeleine Arbor founded a workshop for female designers on rue Saint-Paul, shocked to see employers giving men their chances above all. In front of her younger daughters, the multidisciplinary artist approached the great collective dreams to ride, while remaining glued to the accidents of the course, to the house on the corner, to the vision of a snowfall. It is in homage to the St. Lawrence and Quebec winters that flows river of light, its molded glass chandelier at the Citadelle of Quebec. Under his wand, the panorama was enchanted.
I thanked her one last time by wishing her a happy centenary! “A hundred years is a long time in saperlipopette! she called out to me. The flakes were falling outside. She will always have celebrated them.