Borduas, Paul-Émile

Borduas, Paul-Émile (1905–1960). Canadian painter, active mainly in Montreal but also in Paris and New York. He trained as a church decorator under Ozias Leduc, then studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Montreal. In 1928 he went to Paris, where he studied briefly with Maurice Denis, and in 1930 returned to Montreal, where he opened a studio for mural decoration. This met with little success, so he supported himself by working as an art teacher. In the early 1940s, under Surrealist influence, he started to produce ‘automatic’ paintings (see AUTOMATISM) and he was the driving force behind the radical abstract group Les Automatistes. The group's anarchistic manifesto, Refus global, published in 1948, led to his dismissal from his teaching post. Serious ill-health and in 1951 the break-up of his marriage increased his problems. In 1953 he moved to New York, where he met several leading Abstract Expressionists (although communication was difficult as Borduas spoke little English), and in 1955 he settled in Paris. In his final years he achieved an international reputation, and at the time of his death (of a heart attack) the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam was planning a ‘mid-career’ retrospective that turned into a memorial tribute. His mature work has an all-over surface animation recalling the work of Jackson Pollock, although the only American influence Borduas acknowledged was that of Franz Kline. He ranks with Riopelle as one of the most important Canadian abstract painters of the post-war years, and like Riopelle he was widely influential in his country.