It is clear from the language used in the Automatistes’
groundbreaking manifesto, “Refus global”, which was published in 1948, that they
were familiar with Breton’s L’Amour fou (which includes “Le Château étoilé”),
Pierre Mabille’s Égrégores ou la vie des civilisations, and the 1947 surrealist
manifesto “Rupture inaugurale”, on which Refus global is to some extent modelled.
The terms “objective chance”, “convulsive”, “egregore”, and “surrational” all appear
in the 1948 publication, the first two taken from L’Amour fou and the fourth
possibly from the 1945 edition of Le Surréalisme et la peinture – since it
contained the 1936 essay “Crise de l’objet”, which adapted this term from Gaston
Bachelard – or possibly from the Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, which
had appeared in 1938 and which had quoted from this same essay in its entry on “surrationalisme”.
The poet Claude Gauvreau, who was the principal animator of the Automatiste community
after Borduas distanced himself from it in the 1950s, is quite certain that Borduas
did not read Breton’s manifestos until after the publication of Refus global.
[1]
These same years in Montreal saw the development of a rival
group of artists who were also interested in surrealism, though they were less-intensively
engaged in a scrutiny of its texts, and much less confrontational; their own manifesto,
“Prisme d’yeux”, for example, advocated an “open painting” rather than liberation
more broadly: “we refuse to be confined to the barracks of the plastic arts”, declared
the “Refus global” manifesto, [4] while the focus in “Prisme d’yeux” was on art: “We
are thinking of painting which obeys only its deepest spiritual needs while respecting
the material possibilities of pictorial art.” [5] Most of these artists, including the
future surrealists Jean Benoît and Mimi Parent, were students of Alfred Pellan at
the École de Beaux-Arts in Montreal, Pellan being a modernist artist who had spent
fourteen years in Paris, and who began teaching at the school in 1943. Pellan crossed
paths with Breton in 1944 when both were on vacation in the Gaspésie, and his own
drawing and painting became more openly surrealist after this encounter. He made
cadavres exquis with his students, and they shared surrealist publications like
VVV with the Automatistes through Françoise Sullivan, at that time an EBA
student, though there doesn’t seem to have been the same intensive study and discussion
of surrealist writings as there was among the Automatistes. Nevertheless, several
of the artists associated with Pellan, including Roland Giguère, Léon Bellefleur,
and Albert Dumouchel were associated with the Phases movement in Paris in the 1950s
and also with the surrealist group there during the close association between the
two groups in the early 1960s, and Alan Glass became a distinguished surrealist
object-maker in Mexico City – not to mention Benoît and Parent’s central role in
the Paris group from 1959. It was Gauvreau’s opinion that these artists had remained
at the stage of mechanical automatism, which he and his comrades had superseded,
and – whatever the truth of the matter – this attitude helps explain why the Automatistes
were less willing to enter into a fruitful relationship with the international surrealist
movement than those associated with Pellan. [6]
Another important though idiosyncratic adaptation of surrealist
practices was by the Canadian poet P. K. Page, who exhibited her artwork under her
married name P. K. Irwin. Page’s husband was a diplomat who became the Canadian
ambassador to Mexico in 1960. She met Leonora Carrington in Mexico City in 1961,
and worked closely with her until the couple left Mexico in 1964, reading Jung and
Ouspensky and learning to produce visionary paintings in egg tempera, which she
continued to make at her home near Victoria, BC. [7]
More recent surrealist collectives established themselves
in Canada after surrealist writings in translation became more easily available,
or after the wider distribution of those available in French, and sources become
more diffuse and difficult to pin down. The members of the West Coast Surrealist
Group, formally established in 1977 but in existence informally since 1967, were
initially drawn the occult side of surrealism as this had developed in the 1950s,
and they engaged in ritual practices as well as the production of artworks and publications;
Gregg Simpson was introduced to Dada, surrealism, esoteric thought and beat literature
by Al Neil while in the Al Neil Trio – an experimental jazz unit – and he, Gilles
Foisy, and David UU pursued the idea of a magic art in their art and writing. Another
important influence was the collage work of Max Ernst, which informed the production
of several of these artists. When Michael Bullock joined them in 1977, he brought
his contact with Conroy Maddox and other British surrealists to bear on the group,
and Ladislav Guderna brought his experience of Slovak surrealism to the group when
he joined it in 1979.
NOTES
1. Claude Gauvreau,
“L’Épopée automatiste vue par un cyclope” (1969), in Gauvreau, Écrits sur l’art,
ed. Gilles Lapointe (Montreal: L’Hexagone, 1996),
p. 67.
2. The 1948 publication Refus global
included the manifesto, two other texts by Borduas, an essay on dance by Françoise
Sullivan, three theatre pieces by Gauvreau, other texts by Bruno Cormier and Leduc,
and photographs by Maurice Perron in a package designed by Riopelle.
3. Paul-Émile Borduas, “Comments on Some
Current Words”, in Total Refusal: The Complete 1948 Manifesto of the Montreal
Automatists, trans. Ray Ellenwood (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1985), p. 46.
4. “Total Refusal”, in Total Refusal,
p. 37 (translation slightly modified).
5.
http://conseildesarts.org/documents/Manisfeste/manifeste_prisme_dyeux.htm.
6. Claude Gauvreau,
letter to Jean-Claude Dussault, 19 April 1950, in Claude Gauvreau and Jean-Claude
Dussault, Correspondance 1949–1950 (Montreal: L’Hexagone, 1993), p. 324.
7. On this period, see P. K. Page, Mexican
Journal, ed. Margaret Steffler (Erin, ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2015), and
Michèle Rackham Hall, The Art of P. K. Irwin: Observer, Other, Gemini (Erin,
ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2016).
STEVEN HARRIS (Canadá). Born in Montreal, raised in Vancouver, Steven Harris is an art historian living in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, who was on the editorial team of the International Encyclopedia of Surrealism and who recently completed a book on the surrealists, pataphysicians, and improvising dancers and musicians in Alabama.
SUZANNE VAN DAMME (Bélgica, 1901-1986). Pintora posimpresionista belga que evolucionó hacia el surrealismo en la década de 1940. Se formó en las Academias de Bruselas y Gante y en el Studio L’Effort de Bruselas. Durante su estancia en Ostende, recibió la influencia de James Ensor. A principios de la década de 1930, Van Damme se mudó a París, donde conoció al pintor y poeta italiano Bruno Capacci, quien se convirtió en su marido. Ella pasó mucho tiempo en París, el sur de Francia, Londres y Florencia. En 1941 entró en contacto con los surrealistas y participó en la Exposición Internacional Surrealista de 1947 en París, organizada por Breton y Duchamp. Sus obras de los años 1940 hacen claramente referencia a Picasso, De Chirico, Seligmann y también a Toyen. Expuso en la Bienal de Venecia en 1935, 1954 y 1962 y en la Bienal de São Paulo en 1953. Cuando más tarde se mudó a Florencia, comenzó a crear obras más abstractas antes de desarrollar un lenguaje muy personal lleno de signos y símbolos. Sus obras se convirtieron entonces en conjuntos de ideogramas compuestos por minipinturas con elementos abstractos y figurativos. Es de lamentar, sin embargo, que su obra surrealista de pinturas haya sido comprada por coleccionistas y rara vez aparezca en colecciones públicas. Suzanne van Damme es la artista invitada en esta edición de Agulha Revista de Cultura.
Agulha Revista de Cultura
Número 257 | novembro de 2024
Artista convidada: Suzanne van Damme (Bélgica, 1901-1986)
Editores:
Floriano Martins | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
Elys Regina Zils | elysre@gmail.com
ARC Edições © 2024
∞ contatos
https://www.instagram.com/agulharevistadecultura/
http://arcagulharevistadecultura.blogspot.com/
FLORIANO MARTINS | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
ELYS REGINA ZILS | elysre@gmail.com
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário