This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A painter and sculptor whose work led the way in Canada from Realism to Abstraction, Paul-Émile Borduas was highly controversial, especially in his early years as a working artist and teacher in Montreal. In 1948, he was terminated as a drawing instructor from the Ecole de Meuble because of his published manifesto, Refus Global (Total Refusal), which was critical of the provincial attitudes prevalent in French-Canadian culture, of government corruption, and especially critical of the dominant Roman Catholic Church. Borduas asserted that creating art was a critical component of changing to a new culture based on purity of emotions, sensuality and feelings.
Borduas was born in St. Hiliare, a village 20 miles from Montreal, and from childhood he showed interest and talent in art. However, his family, supported by a father who was a carpenter and metal worker, did not have the means to send him to art school, so he apprenticed with a local church decorator, Ozias Leduc, who took great interest in the young Borduas and provided him with decorative skills and also sponsored him for a scholarship at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. This training was followed by two years in France, studying with artists focused on religious subjects.
In 1932, he returned to Canada with the idea of continuing with Leduc in church decoration. However, economic times were difficult, and he could not find work, so he turned to teaching in primary schools and in 1937, at the Ecole de Meuble, a school of design that was considered somewhat progressive. There he became unpopular among traditionalists for his promotion of avant-garde aesthetic philosophies including Nabis, a precursor of Art Nouveau influenced by Paul Gaughin that asserted that visual art images could be distorted to reflect artists' emotions rather than reality. Ozias Leduc had brought the idea to his attention relative to linking religious and abstract art, and Borduas had studied with Nabis artists in France including Vuillard, Bonnard and Denis. In the late 1930s, Borduas joined and became very active in the Montreal Contemporary Arts Society, whose goal was increasing the popularity of Abstract art.
However, he became more aggressive than most of the other members, and led a group of young, highly radical French-Canadian artists, who named themselves "automatistes" because of their belief that art should be automatic or spontaneous and that the goal should be subconscious expression rather than 'beautiful' images. In his Refus Global, Borduas, urged French-Canadians to throw off the authority of their social mores, their government and their church and live their lives as 'automatistes', people who acted spontaneously and impulsively. Inspiration for some of his views had come from his days of teaching art to children and observing their unique, 'natural' creativity.
Making these assertions in the 1940s, he was feeling positive about changing Canadians' views of art, and was also reflecting what he was learning from Parisien refugees, many of them intellectuals, escaping France from German invasion. Pere Couturier, a Dominican teacher and artist who lectured at the Ecole de Meuble, was especially influential on Borduas, as was Alfred Pellan, a Parisian artist who exhibited avant-garde work in Montreal.
But for him, the immediate results were loss of job and general respect and failure to create the world of which he dreamed, but he and his followers "did change the ways in which artists painted, and for some at least, thought about the nature of art." (mta.ca/faculty)
By 1951, he was painting very little, and losing his health, turned to watercolors, which he felt were less demanding. He did acquire some financial freedom due to the patronage of two Montreal collectors, and one of them, Gerard Lortie, sold more than 150 of his paintings in Canada. With a bit of money for independence, Borduas went brief to New York, where he associated with Abstract Expressionists including Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock. In 1955, he moved to Paris, where he died in 1960 of a heart attack.
Sources:
www.mta.ca/faculty/arts/canadian_studies/english/about/study_guide/artists/paul_emile
_bourdas.html
William Withrow, "Contemporary Canadian Painting", http://www.godardgallery.com/borduas.htm
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