Why Francoise Sullivan Was Essential for the Quebec Art Scene

A Françoise Sullivan retrospective is currently touring Canada in celebration of the 70^th anniversary of the publication of Refus Global (Global Refusal), the most important art manifesto in Canadian history. The retrospective opened at The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) in October, and will later travel to several other Canadian cities. It features more than 50 works by Sullivan dating from the 1940s through the present, including sculptures, paintings, photographs, and select live performances. At age 93, Sullivan is the last surviving member of Les Automatistes, the 16-member art collective that co-signed Refus Global. The manifesto rejected Canadian mid-century traditions, which the signatories felt kept culture at a standstill and created resistance to abstract art. The text read in part, “Make way for magic! Make way for objective mysteries! Make way for love! Make way for necessities! The passionate act breaks free, through its very dynamism. We gladly take on full responsibility for tomorrow. Passions shape the future spontaneously, unpredictably, necessarily.” When Refus Global first appeared in print it shocked the Canadian ruling class with its outspoken statements against the Christian church and other authoritarian powers. The backlash was so strong at first that Les Automatistes became social pariahs. Yet within just 12 years their manifesto would help spark the Quiet Revolution, the series of social and political reforms that led to Canadian independence and the establishment of a free and modern Canadian culture. So revered are these artists today that the name of the grand prize Canada awards to artists is the Prix Paul Émile Borduas, after the primary author of Refus Global. As for Sullivan, the current retrospective at MAC proves that she has earned her place not only as a cultural revolutionary but as a member of the highest echelon of Canadian culture. Still active in her studio today, she has never ceased to take seriously the passionate intentions of Les Automatistes, repeatedly re-inventing her practice and striving to understand the complex mysteries of abstract art.

Painting With Thoughts

Sullivan was a frustrated painter when she graduated from the École des beaux-arts in 1945. She had been painting Fauvist imitations and striving to understand abstraction. But like the other artists in Les Automatistes she believed her true creative liberation could only be found in automatism, as taught by the Surrealists. Since she was struggling so much to find her authentic voice through painting, she decided instead to turn to dance, but there was not a single school for modern dance in Quebec at the time, so she moved to New York and studied dance there. That experience finally endowed Sullivan with the connection to her inner consciousness that she had long sought. She described the connection dance gave her to abstraction as “painting thoughts.” In 1947, she returned to Montreal and opened her own modern dance school, instructing her students to be experimental, intuitive, and to open themselves up to multicultural traditions.

Françoise Sullivan - Tondo VIII, 1980. Collection of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Purchase (1984.13). Photo: MNBAQ, Pierre Charrier © Françoise Sullivan / SODRAC (2018)

Shortly after opening her school, Sullivan had the idea to create a series of improvisational dances based on the four seasons. She enlisted two fellow artists from Les Automatistes to help. Jean-Paul Riopelle would film the dances, and Maurice Perron would take photographs. Whether she finished all four dances is unknown. The only surviving footage are photographs Perron took of the winter dance, called “Danse dans la neige (Dance in the Snow).” In addition to teaching and improvising, Sullivan choreographed a number of modern dances and performed them around Montreal. They received criticism from academics, but earned rave reviews from avant-garde audiences. By 1948, Sullivan was so highly regarded in intellectual circles as an authority on modern dance that when the initial 400 copies of Refus Global were initially sold at the Librairie Tranquille, a counterculture bookstore, they included an essay written by Sullivan titled “La danse et l’espoir” (Dance and Hope). It described the potential of modern dance to act as an ideal medium for the “spontaneous expression of intense emotion.”

Françoise Sullivan - Chute en rouge, 1966. Painted steel, 210.5 x 127 x 52 cm. Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. © Françoise Sullivan / SODRAC (2018). Photo: Guy l'Heureux

Continuous Re-invention

Sullivan thrived in the medium of dance for more than a decade, but by the end of the 1950s, as a single mother of four, she decided the demands of life as a performer no longer suited her goals. Having trained for some years to weld metal, she reinvented herself as a sculptor. To her way of thinking, the principles of sculpting were not really so different from those of dance. As Sullivan recently told Jim Burke of the Montreal Gazette, “Sculpture is the same creative impulse for me,” because it manifests “in three dimensions, like dance.” She won the 1963 Prix du Québec for her sculpture “Concentric Fall” (1962), which featured a lyrical assemblage of circular metal disks winding organically around three geometric forms. That piece formed the basis for several large-scale public commissions she made that are installed across Canada, which make use of similar compositional elements such as metal discs, geometric forms, and circular holes in space.

Françoise Sullivan - Spirale, 1969. Plexiglas. 65,5 x 31 x 35,4 cm. Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Photo : Richard-Max Tremblay © Françoise Sullivan / SODRAC (2018)

After decades as a successful sculptor, Sullivan returned in the 1990s to the medium she walked away from back in 1945: abstract painting. This time around she found her authentic painterly voice. In fact, easily the most breathtaking moment in her retrospective at MAC is an installation of four large-scale monochromatic red paintings titled “Rouge nos 3, 5, 6, 2” (1997). The subtle intricacies of these paintings speak to the long effort Sullivan has made to express the abstract qualities of human existence. At first glance they are all four alike – the same hue, the same size. But their sameness is an illusion. Like every other work Sullivan has done, they are records of individual passion and instinct. Nuanced differences in surface quality, brush marks and tonality distinguish each from the others, recording the innumerable intuitive, fleeting decisions Sullivan made during her process. In the spirit of mystery that has long defined her relationship to abstract art, they show not what makes dance, sculpture and painting different, but what unites them as one.

The Françoise Sullivan retrospective at MAC is on view through 20 January 2018. Visit the museum website for touring information.

Featured image: Françoise Sullivan - Hommage to Paterson [Hommage à Paterson], diptych, 2003. Acrylic on canvas. 137 x 226 in. Photo: Guy L'Heureux/Galerie Simon Blais. © Françoise Sullivan/SODRAC (2018)
By Phillip Barcio