When visiting most major art collections in Canada—be it the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts or the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa—one is likely to encounter the distinctive abstractions created by artists affiliated with “Automatisme,” a Montreal-based modernist movement active during the early 1940s through the 1950s. The Automatistes consisted of a group of young painters who gathered around Paul-Émile Borduas, united by their sympathies for European abstraction and outrage over Montreal’s pervasive cultural and political conservatism. The core of this group included Marcel Barbeau, Marcelle Ferron, Roger Fauteux, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Pierre Gauvreau, Louise Renaud, and Jean-Paul Riopelle. While this important movement, long celebrated in Quebec, has been gaining recognition in Canada outside its home province, it is still little known beyond national borders. Aiming to remedy this international oversight, Roald Nasgaard and Ray Ellenwood organized a visually compelling exhibition of Automatiste works, which opened in Ontario at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham before traveling to Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

The exhibition was chronologically arranged and had a formalist bent, its narrative centered on the group’s aesthetic development. At the Albright-Knox, four connecting rooms contained copious examples of Automatiste works, beginning with heavy-handed automatic abstractions created in the early 1940s and ending with more accomplished gestural abstractions from the late 1940s and 1950s. There were also two adjacent but connecting rooms, one of which included works by the next generation of Canadian abstract painters, labeled “Post-Automatistes,” and the other of which contained Surrealist paintings and international examples of gestural abstractions from the Albright-Knox’s own collection. The show was accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with essays by Nasgaard and Ellenwood, texts that add clarity and depth to the exhibition’s narrative.

The exhibition and catalogue proclaim Automatisme to be Canada’s first avant-garde artistic movement, labeled as such due to the group’s stance against artistic, social, and political conventions in Montreal, as articulated in their 1948 manifesto Refus global (Total Refusal). The movement’s importance is also rooted in its artistic inclusiveness—painters, poets, dancers, designers, and thespians were among the participants—and in the artists’ aesthetic experiments, which were in keeping with other international modernist movements, namely Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction. The exhibition placed heavy emphasis on the artists’ experimentation with automatic writing, as championed by Surrealist André Breton. Indeed, this is the primary lens through which the group’s works from the 1940s, hung in the first two galleries, are understood. This focus was conveyed in the first gallery’s main textual panel, which featured a long quote by Borduas in which he describes a working method whereby he used automatic techniques to tap into his unconscious and thus claimed to be painting without “preconceived” ideas. This quote resonates with his early gouaches (ca. 1942), which were likely completed in one sitting and are not compositionally refined. It is Borduas’s gouaches, exhibited at his first solo show in 1942, that are said to have helped launch the “Automatiste revolution” (17).

The emphasis on automatic techniques, while visually strong in Borduas’s early paintings, became harder to understand as one viewed the mid-1940s works displayed in the same rooms. Paintings created by Borduas and Gauvreau, and a series of multi-media collages by Mousseau, all produced between 1944 and 1947, evidenced a balance between “free abstraction” and conscious composition, and thus presented a challenge to the definition of automatism as presented in the wall text. Nasgaard’s catalogue essay helps to clarify this issue by more fully explaining the Automatistes’ unique take on automatic-writing techniques. Acknowledging that “the border between what was unpremeditated and what was intentional may sometimes seem a little clouded” (14), he explains that Borduas intermixed Surrealist procedures with “a conscious plastic awareness,” or a state of alertness that allowed the artist to make compositional decisions. Many of the group’s participants, including Gauvreau, tried to distance themselves from the Surrealists, claiming that they were not doing cold “mechanical automatism” but rather a form of “plastic” or “inspired” automatism: “plastic” indicating the focus on material and matter over imagery, and “inspired” suggesting that while the artists were working from “first impulses,” these impulses were not unmotivated (52). Perhaps it is for this reason that many members of the group, including Borduas, were uncomfortable with the movement being labeled “Automatisme,” a title that took hold after 1947 when the group showed under that name at the Galerie du Luxembourg in Paris.

The interplay between spontaneity and discipline became more central as the viewer continued through the exhibition and encountered works from the late 1940s. For example, Barbeau’s eye-catching painting Au château d’Argol (1946–47) is characterized by gestural marks, which are laid over a softly painted ground consisting of a patchwork of color. While the dripping technique used in this painting brings it in dialogue with early gestural abstractions by Jackson Pollock, the interplay between figure and ground creates an effect wholly unlike the American’s late 1940s works. During this period, Borduas’s heavy-handed automatist experiments are replaced by luminous non-objective abstractions. His stunning ou Cimetière glorieux of 1948 stands out among the Automatiste works created around the same time. Over a background of shifting swatches of muted colors, Borduas painted numerous loosely rectangular units, which are early manifestations of what would evolve into “taches,” the term Nasgaard uses to refer to the thick marks of paint applied with a palette knife (58). The tache would later become the basic building block of Borduas’s paintings and those of several of his peers.

The most intense period of artistic dialogue and collaboration among the artists affiliated with Automatisme was between 1942 and 1948. By 1947, a year before Refus global was published and just as many of the artists were beginning to formulate their mature styles, the core members of the group began to disperse: Riopelle, the most internationally famous of the Automatistes, left for Paris in 1947, as did the painter Leduc. By 1953, after losing his position at the École du meuble de Montréal due to the controversy surrounding the content of Refus global, Borduas himself left for New York, where he stayed for three years before moving to Paris. In fact, many of the most celebrated and accomplished paintings by Borduas and Riopelle were created outside of Montreal. It was in the international art centers of New York and Paris that the “tache” became a central feature in works by both artists, paintings that stand out for their tactile materiality. Ironically, then, it was during the very years that the Automatistes had the most public visibility that the group’s unity began to break down.

As already mentioned, many of the artists’ geographical shifts were matched by changes in their aesthetic sensibilities, as was readily apparent in the second to last room of the exhibition. From a visual perspective, this space, which focused on masterful paintings by Borduas and Riopelle created in the 1950s, stole the show. During this period, these artists continued to move away from spontaneous gestural abstraction to more deliberate construction. As Nasgaard explains, in paintings like Pierres angulaires (Corner Stones, 1958), Borduas built the composition with a palette knife, forming (even sculpting) shapes, a technique that draws attention to the materiality of the thickly applied paint (72). Additionally, by the 1950s, both artists had eliminated the distinction between figure and ground to create an all-over effect that was in dialogue with what was occurring in New York and Paris at the time. Strengthening the argument for the international relevance of Automatiste works was the Albright-Knox’s decision to include in the exhibition a room with works from the permanent collection by Surrealists and various artists working within the framework of gestural painters, including representatives from Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, and CoBrA. Viewing the Montreal works next to internationally known paintings made clear the visual simultaneity and/or exchange between Automatisme and other movements.

The exhibition concluded with paintings by the next generation of artists, grouped under the label “Post-Automatiste.” Of particular note were the softly painted, luminous abstraction of Jean McEwen, who was in contact with Riopelle and Borduas during his formative years as an artist, and the more structured and thickly impastoed canvases of Guido Molinari. The wall text explained that these artists questioned some of the original premises of Automatisme, namely their figure-ground composition and their appeal to spontaneity and intuition. As is evident in his art, this critique was instigated by Automatiste founder Borduas himself, who in 1956 confessed that the label “Automatisme” was of no importance to him anymore (138).

The strength of the exhibition rested in the quality of the works of art on view, particularly those created in the late 1940s and 1950s. The paintings made it visually apparent that the Automatistes, from an early date, were in step with international modernist movements both aesthetically and intellectually. This narrative is most textually coherent in the exhibition catalogue, as opposed to the wall texts, which were somewhat fragmented. Ellenwood’s essay, “Automatisme Beyond ‘The Barracks of Plastic Arts,’” is particularly outstanding in its detailed explanation of the social, political, and cultural forces that brought the Automatistes together, thus giving historical weight to the artistic and political radicalism of the movement. For this reason, his essay might have been better placed as the opening text of the catalogue since it provides contextual grounding for Nasgaard’s more formalist discussion. In keeping with the exhibition’s stated attempt to present Automatisme as a multi-media movement, Ellenwood’s essay touches on poets and theatrical performances of affiliated members, and includes a longer exploration of dance. This discussion, once again, expands on and provides clarity to the content of the exhibition. While it is admirable that the curators tried to include videos and photographs documenting Automatiste dances, the wall text accompanying these materials could have better explained their visual relevance within the context of the Automatiste movement, as Ellenwood does.

Nasgaard’s essay is at its best when it is focused on the works of art themselves and on the rich international artistic context in which they were created. The international focus of the exhibition and catalogue, however, is somewhat undercut by the tendency to overstate the Automatistes’ cultural isolation from New York in the 1940s. Perhaps motivated by a concern for carving out a place for the Automatistes in history, Nasgaard claims that the Canadian artists had little or no knowledge of parallel movements in New York during the early years of the movement; for instance, he writes that the Automatistes created their own form of “action painting” in the mid-1940s, “and they did this independent of, and without knowledge of, the Abstract Expressionism that was emerging in New York at the time” (30). This claim seems tenuous given other evidence Nasgaard presents suggesting that the Montreal artists should have been aware of the New York art scene. For example, in 1946, around the time that Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock were experimenting with Surrealist techniques that were in keeping with what the Automatistes were doing, the first exhibition of exclusively Automatiste paintings opened at a dance school in New York City (44). (This show was organized by Françoise Sullivan, a dancer affiliated with the Automatiste group, who had been studying in the city.) Moreover, the Automatistes may have had more in common with Abstract Expressionism during the late 1940s than Nasgaard’s narrative acknowledges. Nasgaard explains, for instance, that the Automatistes were not merely interested in painting the psychological, but rather attempted to link the personal with the universal. “By this account,” Nasgaard continues, “Montreal’s Automatisme differentiates itself from New York Action painting, which posited painting as the enactment of the individual artist’s existential psychodramas” (53). Such an understanding of Abstract Expressionism side-steps many of the artists’ serious interest in Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and Jungian archetypes. Acknowledging the aesthetic and intellectual overlaps between Montreal and New York gestural abstraction in the 1940s would have only served to strengthen the exhibition’s interest in presenting the Automatistes as internationally au currant.

The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue make it clear that the Automatiste movement is aesthetically and intellectually rich, and thus warrants greater international attention. The most accomplished paintings in the exhibition, particularly those by Borduas and Riopelle, have a powerful presence; they have a tactility and materiality that make them both distinctive and visually compelling. The catalogue, in combining the contextual and the formal, offers two distinct but interrelated perspectives on the Automatistes, giving the exhibition depth and intellectual weight. It is a shame that the show did not travel further than a city on the Canadian border as it certainly contributed to recent understandings of art production as a complex process of simultaneous discovery and exchange among diverse art centers worldwide.