Agulha Revista de Cultura: STEVEN HARRIS | Sources for Surrealism in Canada

Sources for surrealism in Canada were idiosyncratic in the early years – early years in this instance being the early 1940s, for the movement had little impact in Canada before then. News of surrealism first filtered through the state censorship of publications in Quebec through Minotaure, to which the library of the École du Meuble subscribed soon after its founding in 1937. (The École du Meuble trained artisans in wood, stone, and metal, but it also had a fine-arts component.) Its principal painting instructor, Paul-Émile Borduas, began to read Minotaure and Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror around 1941, and in response he produced the first works that he thought of as surrealist – a series of gouaches exhibited in 1942 – and began to hold Tuesday soirées at his home in Montreal, which students from his own institution and several from the rival École de Beaux-Arts attended. Although Minotaure reproduced many surrealist artworks in its issues, it was texts like André Breton’s “Le Château étoilé”, and his and Benjamin Péret’s writings about decalcomania (all of which appeared in Minotaure no. 8 [June 1936]), which most excited them, and this preference for surrealist texts over surrealist works of art remained true for the group – which would become known as the Automatistes, after a critic so named them in 1947. This preference held true despite the fact that the majority of the Automatistes were visual artists, though there were also poets, actors, dancers, a photographer, and a medical student among them. While their access to surrealist texts remained restricted through much of the 1940s, one of their number, Louise Renaud, was able to send or bring them books and journals from New York – including issues of VVV, Aimé Césaire’s Les Armes miraculeuses, and Gisèle Prassinos’ La Sauterelle arthritique – when she began working as a nanny for the art dealer Pierre Matisse in 1943.

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]

Theirs was therefore an idiosyncratic understanding of surrealism based on a limited number of readings, though these were intensively discussed in the Tuesday soirées and during several summer retreats. Fernand Leduc first made contact with Breton in 1943, and three of the Automatistes were in Paris in 1947 – and one of them, Jean-Paul Riopelle, both signed “Rupture inaugurale” and participated in the 1947 surrealist exhibition there. Neveretheless, there was a reluctance to get closer to the Paris group for two reasons: the Automatistes’ incomplete understanding of the ideas and values of the surrealist movement, as we have seen; and because they felt a growing sense of their own empowerment as individuals in developing something distinct from what surrealism had to offer, especially in the plastic arts. Although the manifesto is oriented to a fierce critique of Quebec society, including in its critique a condemnation of Christianity, Borduas makes some criticisms of surrealism elsewhere in Refus global, viewing the surrealist artwork in Minotaure as insufficient – as too reliant on memory, and thus adulterated. [2] To “mechanical automatism”, by which he means techniques like frottage and decalcomania, and “psychic automatism”, by which he means the figurative art up to that time produced by nearly all surrealist artists, he opposes what he calls “surrational automatism”, adapting the term from surrealist discourse to describe the spontaneous non-figurative artwork that he and his comrades were making, which preceded the abstract expressionists in New York and the informel artists in Paris (and, incidentally, some of the younger surrealist artists in Paris) by several years. Borduas calls “surrational automatism” an “unpremeditated writing in plastic matter”, which involves an engagement with materials and not just a transposition of thought (as he understood surrealist art to be). [3] It was automatic thought articulating itself in matter, with an awareness of what one was doing even as one was working spontaneously (thus the use of the term “surrational”). These ideas, which were being developed in (very) different ways at nearly the same time by Asger Jorn and by Georges Mathieu, led the Automatistes away from a productive engagement with the contemporary surrealist movement, and towards variously successful or unsuccessful careers in the art system.

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]

Events unfolded quite differently in Vancouver around the same time. Two erstwhile members of the London surrealist group, Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff, lived in Vancouver between 1942 and 1946. The regional landscape painter J. W. G. Macdonald attended lectures that Pailthorpe gave there, and the couple introduced Macdonald to automatic drawing in 1945, a practice he continued until his early death in 1960 and which he introduced to two other artists in Calgary and Banff, Marion Nicoll and Alexandra Luke. All three pursued automatic drawing during the 1950s apart from their professional painting practices, which moved into abstraction in all three cases. The chief interest of automatic drawing for all three of them was therapeutic, and they seem to have had little interest in the ideas and values of surrealism otherwise. Nor was it easy to access these for monolingual English-speaking Canadians, given the dearth of translations from French in the 1940s and 1950s.

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.

For their part, Susana Wald and Ludwig Zeller brought their knowledge and understanding of Latin American surrealism with them when they immigrated to Toronto from Chile in 1970–71, and they established contact with the Phases movement in 1975. Wald and Zeller established Oasis Publications that same year, publishing books by Rosamel del Valle, Jorge Cáceres, Humberto Díaz-Casanueva, Enrique Gómez-Correa, Alberta Baeza Flores and E. F. Granell, as well as books by European surrealists and their own works. Zeller was a collage artist as well as a poet, developing the implications of some of Max Ernst’s collages in Une Semaine de bonté – those that used the blank page as their substrate – into an influential body of work, while Wald has pursued a hermetic figurative painting practice. Their daughter Beatriz Hausner has continued an engagement with surrealism through translation as well as contact with the international movement. The latter is true as well for Enrique Lechuga in Montreal, David Nadeau in Quebec City, and for the Recordists W. A. Davison and S. L. Higgins in Toronto. The American anarcho-surrealist Ron Sakolsky established contact with the Chicago surrealist group in the 1990s while living in Illinois, and co-founded the Inner Island Surrealist Group on the west coast of British Columbia in 2003 with his partner Sheila Nopper. Improvised music has played a significant role in the life of this group, as it has for the Recordists, Nadeau, and Lechuga. Indeed, several younger Canadian surrealists have said that their introduction to surrealism came through the musical groups Nurse with Wound and Throbbing Gristle in the late 1970s, which was extended through a deeper reading into the sources in French, English, or Spanish. Lechuga met Wald and Zeller after they relocated to Mexico, and his Éditions Sonámbula are inspired by the example of their Oasis Publications.

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.