Paul-Émile Borduas 1905 - 1960

Blair Laing, Toronto

Private Collection, Saskatoon

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are minor, hairline cracks in the upper left and lower right corners of the canvas. We would like to thank In Restauro for their assistance with this condition report. To see their original notes, please contact Sotheby's directly.
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This painting was purchased from Blair Laing, the Toronto art dealer, in May, 1956, soon after Laing had visited Borduas in his Paris studio in February.

Borduas was taught that the highest calling of art and its traditions was to serve the Catholic Church and the state. With his nose to the winds of change in the world, however, he began to realize that tradition should encourage change, not stifle it. He was mindful of the Surrealists in Europe and aware of the power of the subconscious and 'automatisme', which could mine its unknown insights and images. His frustration with the rigid status quo in Quebec finally boiled over in 1948 when he wrote the 'Réfus Global', a manifesto calling upon artists in all disciplines to overthrow the stultifying Quebec establishment. His attack, supported and signed by twenty-one others, was aimed at both the Catholic Church and the educational system. The so-called 'Quiet Revolution' had started with a blaring challenge to all authority – church, state, and school.

Borduas had lit the fuse. He paid a high price for his insubordination. He was dismissed from his professorship in Montreal and spent most of the last decade of his life in exile in New York, in Paris – and in poverty.

By the time he left Canada in 1953, he had left behind the surreal imagery in his paintings and chose to explore totally abstract work, sometimes in vivid colour and, toward the end of his career, in simple black and white – with huge slabs of black against a white ground, like giant stones in a Japanese raked gravel garden

This particular painting, which was only ever exhibited once locally, shows Borduas' sharp attention to the effects he was able to create by a careful control of the pigments that he then spread out with a palette knife. Faint pink blushes, sparing punctuations of black, and little traces of blue or maroon are squeezed between the larger elements of brick- or shingle-like areas of what is predominantly white, and animate the whole composition. And, fortunately, this painting has not been marred by cracking (due to irregular drying of the paint) nor by use of the inferior black pigment, which Borduas occasionally used. Out of this penultimate series of works, which lead up to Borduas's final large black and white works, this is one of the finest.