Paul-Émile Borduas

Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960), Canadian abstract painter, teacher, and social activist. Borduas is best known as the founder of a group of Montréal painters known as Les Automatistes. This group, which came together in the late 1940s, took the name from their interest in automatism—a method of painting spontaneously, without conscious thought, in order to gain access to the subconscious. Borduas sought to convey his own psychological state through paint and color.

Born in Saint-Hilaire, Québec, Borduas received traditional art training from 1923 to 1927 at the School of Fine Arts in Montréal. While still at school, he worked as an apprentice to Canadian religious painter Ozias Leduc. From 1928 to 1930 he studied in Paris with French fauvist painter Maurice Denis and others (see Fauvism).

Borduas’s early paintings included recognizable figures and were extremely colorful. But by the early 1940s, inspired by surrealist painters (see Surrealism), Borduas began to explore automatism. He not only became a leader in the Montréal artistic community, but he also published an antichurch manifesto, the Refus Global (Global Refusal, 1948). This document called for less church influence in politics, education, and art, in order to free artists from church opposition to abstraction and to other modernist movements. Following its publication, Borduas lost the teaching job he had held in Montréal. He continued to paint in an abstract manner inspired by automatism, but reduced his color palette to variations of brown, black, and white. The simplicity and power of his later works, such as 3+4+1 (1956, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), have led art critics to rank them among the finest achievements in Canadian abstract painting.