BORDUAS AS THE MONSTROUS DOUBLE By Michael Rattray On the ninth of August 1948, the Automatiste manifesto Refus global was released at the Librarie Tranquille to a modest printing of 400. This small manifesto would be referred to as a bomb(1) in several Quebec newspapers in the days approaching its launch, setting the stage for a public debate into the validity of the signatories’ comments concerning the then highly religious and conservatively-minded cultural climate of Québec. The following months would prove to be exceptionally difficult for the figurehead of the Automatiste group, Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960), who would be questionably removed from his teaching position at the École du meuble in a most public fashion. Borduas, facing declining sales and a snowballing negativity towards his worK(2), would place himself into a self-declared exile in 1953, returning at times for personal exhibitions of his work and to participate in the organization and judging of two exhibitions, but never again to reside in Québec. He would die in Paris in 1960 amid little critical recognition of his work outside of Canada despite exhibiting in several galleries in North America and Europe(3). Today, Borduas represents the quintessential example of Québec Modernism. He occupies a prominent placement in the narratives of both the Musée des beaux-arts and the Musée d’art contemporain of Montréal and in 1977 was accorded an award bearing his name(4). The underlying question to this recognition is why? Why has Borduas been placed above the many talented artists of the 1940’s and 1950’s in terms of importance? Why is it, forty-six years after his death, we have an entire graduate class being dedicated to crafting an exhibition around his influence? Why is he placed as the lynchpin of artistic development within the Montréal scene and regarded as the patriarchal figure of a legacy? (5) The purpose of this essay is to examine the importance of Borduas through the lens of sacrificial myth as defined by French philosopher Réne Girard (b.1923) in Violence and the Sacred (1972). It will be argued Borduas occupies such a prominent position in the arts culture of Québec specifically because of his early death and symbolic execution through popular opinion and the media. More then any other member of the Automatiste circle, Borduas exemplifies how an artist of relative marginalization during his lifespan can become larger than life through death. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard proposes a sacrificial crisis acts as the binding agent of an organized society(6) throughout. It is argued, through sacrifice, societal order is restored from crises and maintaine(7). In Girard’s terms, violence can take on many varying degrees dependent on population levels and technological possessions(8). But at the base levels of all societies, people are prone to a violent reciprocity, and this shared tendency of violent behavior allows for unification through varying levels of the sacrificial crisis(9). This crisis can be rectified within the community through a sacrifice of real or symbolic value. For the intent of this essay, the symbolic sacrificial victim will be examined. The community, when faced with a crisis, will symbolically forfeit one of their own members. Girard refers to this target as the “surrogate victim(10)”. The surrogate victim, or scapegoat, will at first be categorized as an evil within the community. Once they have been expulsed from the community the scapegoat will move beyond the sacrificed, and become a ritual victim(11). After a period of ridicule and sacrifice, the ritual victim will develop a “quasi-religious aura of veneration(12)” in relation to the original victimization at the heart of the sacrificial crisis. The community essentially relives a source tragedy through a scapegoat, over and over again, until the sacrificial victim can no longer sustain the cultural order and the community is forced to adapt to a new societal organization(13). Borduas can be seen as a sacrificial victim or scapegoat in the aforesaid terms for a number of reasons. Québécois society during the late 1940’s was still very much a society orientated towards the favor and control of the Catholic Church. Much of Borduas’ wrath in Refus global is directed towards the stymieing and overbearing nature of the church and governmen(14). It is a call for pluralism during an anti-pluralist time. And it was something many within Québécois society were not ready, nor willing, to read. This is not to imply the Refus global is a vacuous statement without precedent. Far from it, the thoughts contained within the publication must have been on many people’s minds at the time. If the ideas and opinions contained within were false, then the “quiet-revolution” of the 1960’s would not have happened. The publication put the Automatistes front and center in the public eye and Borduas would pay for his participation by becoming the scapegoat for the so-called bomb. The stories contained in the newspapers offer the most obvious evidence of the singling out of Borduas over the other Automatistes. Combined with his suspension from the École du meuble, carried out by Jean-Marie Gauvreau (1903-1963) and signed off by Gustave Poisson(15), the public attention would contribute to Borduas’ alienation from Québec society and most likely provide the reasoning behind his self-imposed exile. One of the surprising things about the newspaper articles referring to Borduas is their lack of critique concerning his painting. A telling example comes from a story printed in the Montréal Matin by Roger Duhamel on September 14th 1948. The author reserves the last paragraphs to deal with Borduas where he commends his painting but calls his writing “unintelligible(16)”. Borduas also receives letters through the papers, even being advised by one reader to moderate his opinion before the ridicule kills him(17). The Automatistes are referred to as “drunks(18)” and their automatic style based on surrealist theory is ridiculed in the press through articles belittling “automatic” writing(19). But in the early months after the publication of Refus global, most of the press concerning the publication is directed towards Borduas’ dismissal from the École du meuble. Interestingly, Borduas chose to fight the battle through the same news sources that were dismissing him. On the 22nd of September 1948, Borduas would have stories printed in La Presse, Le Devoir and La Patrie protesting his suspension from his position(20). He would refrain from leaking a confidential letter from Gauvreau that has since become public record through the many publications addressing Borduas’ writings. He would attempt a rebuttal to his dismissal in the book Projections Libérantes, a text that was completed prior to January, 1949, but the immediacy of his rebuttal would be deterred by the stall on its publication until July of 1949(21). It was largely ignored and according to François-Marc Gagnon had a “conspiracy of silence around the event(22)”. Out of the milieu of press clippings and historical accounts of the time it is possible to discern a few commonalities between the way Borduas was dealt with, and the sacrificial victim as defined by Girard. For the crime of Refus global, an attack on the community, Borduas is singled out from a group and dismissed from his sustenance. He is symbolically sacrificed, because without an income, he could not feed his family and he could not paint. If he could have survived making only his art then he would have, his success was one of notoriety, not of monetary success. In the months following his dismissal Borduas wrote frantically, but was dismissed and ignored. His judgment had already been passed through the media. Girard’s theory can define the swiftness of Borduas’ dismissal if it is examined through his attack on the religious foundations of the then Québec society: "When the religious framework of a society starts to totter, it is not exclusively or immediately the physical security of the society that is threatened; rather, the whole cultural foundations of the society is put in jeopardy. The institutions lose their vitality; the protective façade of the society gives way; social values are rapidly eroded, and the whole cultural structure seems on the verge of collapse.”(23) Because Borduas chose to take on the religious framework surrounding his society he was ritually and symbolically sacrificed from his community. Girard argues the symbolic sacrifice must entail a form of unanimity among the population for violence against the scapegoat(24). I would argue unanimity could be exemplified through the majority dispersion of print media and Borduas’ dismissal from his employment. The events that transpired after the release of the Refus global set the stage for Borduas’ later implementation to the level of mythic figure. Because he was only fired from his job and dismissed as a sub-par writer but excellent painter, Borduas prior to 1953 was not the Borduas of 1960. It would require his self-exile, something he had been planning since the early 1940’s(25), and subsequent return to Montreal to judge and critique the younger artists in Matière Chante and Espace 55(26), and later death in Paris before he could be interned into the legacy figure he has become. Borduas’ life post-1948 reads like a sacrificial tragedy. He dies sick, with little sales and little money(27). His last years are spent living in New York City, where he would absorb the New York school, and then Paris, where he would reconfigure his own painting into a dramatically reduced, almost minimalist style and complete some of his most revered works. It can be argued that upon his departure from Montréal Borduas’ painting changes. Something happened to him where the multicolored palettes, with a strong emphasis on foreground and background, of his past are erased in favor of tri-color, bi-chromatic and monochromatic palettes. When there is color, it is no longer the single smudge dab of his Montreal years, but an expressionistic palette knife stroke containing multiple pigments and variations with a composition favoring the overall flatness of each work. His symbolic self-exile and expulsion from Québec is echoed through the change in his art. This is something even the keenest marketers of publicity could not have come up with, which is what makes his story all the more marketable to a broader art audience. The departure of Borduas and subsequent schism in his work fits further into the theories of René Girard. Borduas can now become a double, or a monstrous double(28), where those from within the community can relate to one half of the sacrificial victim. They see themselves reflected through the suffering brought unto the victim. The monster is what they see of themselves, it is the reflection of their weakness in allowing a sacrifice to occur to someone so similar. In short, a kind of cultural mimesis occurs(29), allowing for the ubiquity of the original fault garnered against the sacrificial victim to level out to a societal fault. This theory can be evidenced by the now immense popularity of the Refus global and of Borduas in Québec. As well, after Borduas’ departure from Québec he would continue to exhibit in Montréal(30). There was a support network for Borduas and even though he was removed from his home people continued to follow his work. The changes in his work only increased his notoriety within Montréal(31). His paintings acted as his new presence. In a way, they took over for his absence, and kept interest in his work a prominent feature of the Montréal scene. Divorced from the personal contact of having Borduas as a permanent fixture within the city, the works could begin to be regarded as symbols of the expulsion. This allowed for a furthered detachment of Borduas the person from Borduas the artist, and contributed greatly to the notoriety he would achieve after his passing. Once the monstrous aspect of Borduas, which can be defined as his human qualities and faults that we are all subject to, have been re-absorbed into the community, the mythic double could take precedent. This is the Borduas of catalogues, monographs, and of course, his art. And it is necessary that this occurs after his death, because it is only once he is dead that he can be brought back into his community and regarded with an almost religious fervor and monetary worth to match. In a sense, the man Borduas is replaced with the image, and luckily, the image can be owned and manufactured. The image can have permanent museum collections named after the same text that in 1948 had him removed from his employment of well over ten years and publicly ridiculed. That Borduas began as a religious painter is a fitting addition to his myth. Because of his choice to abandon his religious ambitions in favor of art theory and potential anarchistic ideals, he echoes the changes that would occur within Québec society after his demise, albeit in a less extreme way then the future he imagined in the Refus global. An avant-garde of the cultural-revolution, he acts as Girard’s surrogate victim, someone who dies in a tragic manner “so that the entire community, threatened by the same fate, can be reborn in a new or renewed cultural order(32).” With Borudas as the figurehead of Québécois modernism he is removed from his initial statements of attack towards the community that would later embrace him. Statements such as, “the wealthy stay away from us. They could not with impunity make contact with incendiaries(33)”, take on an imbedded tone of triviality now that his work is recognized as a point of worship in the new halls of the church of art. A place where we worship at a mandate of arms length reciprocity, between the ideal, and the real. ENDNOTES
Borduas, Paul-Émile, Paul-Émile Borduas: Writings 1942-1958, ed. Francois-Marc Gagnon, trans. Francois-Marc Gagnon and Dennis Young, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1978. Bourassa, Andre-G., Fisette, Jean and Lapointe, Gilles, Paul-Émile Borduas Écrits: I AND II. Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1987. Gagnon, François-Marc, Paul-Émile Borduas, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1988. Gagnon, François-Marc, Chronique du Mouvement Automatiste Québécois 1941-54, Lanctôt Éditeur, 1998. Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, John Hopkins University Press, 1972. |