Ouvri

Provenance:
Private Collection, Montreal

Literature:
Carolle Gagnon and Ninon Gauthier, Marcel Barbeau: Le regard en fugue, 1990, reproduced page 109, plate 10

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Claude Gauvreau, Écrits sur l'art, 1996, page 47
Notes:
Claude Gauvreau, the poet and critic par excellence of the Automatist Group, told the story of one incident that he considered revealed Borduas's unique shortcoming as a teacher, and it involves Marcel Barbeau. Here are the circumstances as he told them. Barbeau had produced a series of extremely free and spontaneous paintings that created a lot of enthusiasm among the Automatists. Barbeau himself was perfectly happy with the result, and was reported to have said, "It is the first time that I paint with such a joy!" Barbeau's success was heralded to Borduas, who had not yet seen the paintings. Perhaps jealous of his authority in matters of judgment of what made the character of an automatist painting, Borduas visited Barbeau to see the new works, and was not in a very good mood. He criticized Barbeau's recent works in an extremely negative manner, and to make his point clear he told him: "It must be objects on a background that recedes to infinity".

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In other words, Borduas was imposing on Barbeau his own system of composition, as one can see for example, in Parachutes végétaux, 1947 or Carquois fleuris, 1947, respectively at the National Gallery of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Gauvreau, who was on the spot when this happened, wanted to object to Borduas's arbitrariness - why should a system that was good for him become the rule for another? Where was the idea of the non-preconceived gesture so crucial for automatism? Where was the need for total spontaneity? However Barbeau, always deferent to the master, asked Gauvreau to stay quiet.

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Barbeau was profoundly affected by Borduas's critique and, in a typically extremist fashion, he destroyed forty of his paintings from that period. Only one survived the auto-da-fé, the famous Tumulte à la mâchoire crispée, 1946, now at the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal. But this painting alone makes us understand what happened. Barbeau was already beyond the dichotomy of objects and background, and proposed a more or less unified field in his painting. It was difficult to focus on one section over another one, and the old idea of composition was threatened.

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Ouvri (titles among Automatists are often more phonetic than semantic) was painted 10 years later, with full awareness of American painting, as Barbeau had been in contact with the New York scene in 1951 and 1952. Ouvri is, in fact, a painting where this dichotomy is completely eliminated. Instead, what we have is a field of marks done with the knife, each one of equal importance in a perfect all-over composition. The slant of each stroke suggests a drift from right to left, and the painting could go forever in every direction. Even Riopelle was not ready to go so far. It could be said that, in the meantime, Barbeau had overcome his depression over Borduas's remark and succeeded in creating a more radical painting than Tumulte à la mâchoire crispée.

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The significance of this painting to the development of Canadian art is crucial. It is our relationship with the New York school that is in question here. How was it possible to abandon what Guido Molinari used to call the Euclidian space to adopt a more energetic field of energy? It is impossible to stress enough the importance of Barbeau and of this painting in particular in the advent of Abstract Expressionism in Canada.

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We thank François-Marc Gagnon of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute of Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, for contributing the above essay.