Paul-Émile Borduas

Paul-Émile Borduas (November 1, 1905 - February 22, 1960) was a Canadian painter known for his abstract paintings. He was also an activist for the separation of church and state, especially for art, in Quebec.

Biography

Borduas was born in Saint-Hilaire, Quebec. At the age of fifteen he became an apprentice to Ozias Leduc, a church decorator. Leduc gave Borduas a basic artististic training, teaching him how to restore and decorate churches. In 1923, assisted by a scholarship Leduc had secured for him, he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, which he followed up by studying in Paris from 1928 to 1930.

He began painting abstracts in 1941, becoming more interested in the act of painting rather than the subject matter. He and some of his students became known as the Automatistes for their attempts to paint "automatically". It was with these students that he wrote Le Refus Global in 1948. It was an important manifesto that pushed forward the separation of church and state in Quebec, especially for the arts. The group dispersed soon after the manifesto was published. The manifesto is one of the motions to have sparked the Quiet Revolution in Quebec.

In 1955 he moved back to Paris where he died of a heart attack in 1960.

Images and galleries

• Gallery from the Canadian government's Cybermuse project.
• Self portrait (1940)
• Abstraction No. 7 (1942)
• The Circular Pass, Nest of Aeroplanes (1950)

Written works

• The famous lead manifesto of the Refus Global, translated in English. Also available: the original French version.
• Écrits/Writings 1942–1958 by Paul-Émile Borduas, Billingual edition, edited by François-Marc Gagnon, translated into English by Francois-Marc Gagnon and Dennis Young. (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design: Halifax, 1978.) ISBN 0919616135 (cloth) ISBN 0919616143 (paper)

Information

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• Biography from the Mira Godard Gallery.
• Short biography from the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec.
• Extensive dossier on Borduas at L'Encyclopédie de l'Agora (in French)
• Biography from the Canadian government's citzine magazine.
• Biography from the Eleanor Milne album on the governmental Canada's digital collections website.

Criticism and interpretation

• Paul-Émile Borduas and the Rise of Abstract Art from Mount Allison University. Also available in French.

Honors

• Since 1977, the Prix du Québec in visual arts is named: Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas.
• 1998, Prix Condorcet to All signatories of Refus Global.