Born in 1905, Paul-Émile Borduas was a professor at the École du Meubles de Montréal from 1937 to 1948. Several of the signatories were his students. Born in Mont-Saint-Hilaire and having worked with Ozias Leduc, Borduas made his first stay in France from 1928 to 1930 where he deepened his knowledge and his reflection on art. Upon his return, he married Gabrielle Goyette. The couple have three children. In 1952, four years after his dismissal from the École du Meubles, Borduas sold his house in Mont-Saint-Hilaire and moved to New York. He took the direction of Paris in 1955 and spent the last years of his life there. He died of a heart attack on February 22, 1960.
Born March 3, 1923 in Granby, centenarian Madeleine Arbor is a painter, draftsman, stylist and decorator. She has designed sets and costumes for both theater and television, notably for the show La Boîte à Surprise on Radio-Canada. She signs the manifesto with the first name Magdeleine.
Painter and sculptor born in 1925, Barbeau studied with Borduas at the École du Meubles. Recognized for his abstract and multifaceted works, he traveled between Quebec, Canada, the United States and France. His daughter Manon Barbeau dedicated the documentary Barbeau, free as art to him. Died January 2, 2016 at the age of 90.
As a medical student in the 1940s, he specialized in psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Bruno Cormier is associated with the foundation of the Philippe-Pinel Institute. He is recognized as a pioneer in criminal psychology in Quebec. Died June 17, 1991 at age 71.
Poet, playwright and painter, Claude Gauvreau (1925-1971) became known for his works written in a unique, “explored” language and inspired by automatism. His best-known work, the play Oranges are Green, was being staged at the time of his tragic disappearance.
Painter, screenwriter and director, Pierre Gauvreau is Claude’s brother. He was an officer in the Canadian army during the Second World War. In the 1980s and 1990s, Gauvreau became a leading television screenwriter with his series Le temps d’une paix, Cormoran and Le volcan calme. He died on April 7, 2011 at the age of 88.
The life of actress Muriel Guilbault was short and tortured. Sister of Dyne Mousso, she plays in the theater and in radio dramas. She plays with Gratien Gélinas in Les Fridolinades and Ti-Coq. Passing through Montreal, Jean-Paul Sartre noticed her in an improvised version of his piece Huis clos. She ended her life on January 3, 1952.
The large stained glass wall of the Champ-de-Mars metro station is her. The glass roof in front of the Granby courthouse, her again. The mirror with larks, sculpture-totem erected in front of the headquarters of the ICAO in Montreal, always her. Painter, Marcelle Ferron (1924-2001) is one of the signatories of the manifesto whose works have taken a large place in the public space.
Companion of Thérèse Renaud, this painter spent a long part of his life in Paris. He returned to settle in Montreal a few years before his death on January 27, 2014, at the age of 97. “Borduas was my master. I owe him my awakening to creativity. Creativity is the discovery of one’s fundamental freedom, of being able to work according to one’s inner necessity,” he said in an interview with La Presse in August 2013.
Fernand Leduc’s companion was a poet, novelist, essayist and actress. His membership of the Automatistes goes through, among other things, his poetic text Les sables du rêve in 1946, whose illustrations are by Jean-Paul Mousseau. She died in Paris on December 12, 2005.
Like Marcelle Ferron, Mousseau has created various works that have taken an important place in the Quebec public space. Installed in 1962 at the entrance to Hydro-Québec’s head office, his large mural Light and movement in color is remarkable. We also owe him the colored circles of the Peel metro station and the Opus 74 of the Viau station. He died on February 7, 1991 at the age of 64.
Maurice Perron is considered the photographer of the Automatistes and the editor of Refus global. He was 24 years old when he founded the publishing house Myrtha-Mythe to publish the manifesto. “Maurice Perron was the truth photographer of all our worthwhile struggles,” Madeleine Arbor told La Presse the day after Perron’s death on February 27, 1999.
Sister of Jeanne and Thérèse Renaud, Louise Renaud made a career as a painter and lighting designer. She left Quebec in the mid-1940s and settled in New York. She wants to become a pupil of the painter Fernand Léger, a project that does not materialize. In 1949, she married Francis Kloeppel, editor at the Museum of Modern Art. She died at age 98 in October 2020 in Berkeley, California.
Born Lespérance, dancer and choreographer from Quebec, she was the wife of Jean Paul Riopelle at the time of the signing of Refus global. It is recognized for its contribution to contemporary dance through the creation of the first school of its kind in Canada. “She was a strong, determined woman who gave a lot to dance in Quebec,” said Françoise Sullivan of her when Ms. Riopelle died on July 18, 2022, at age 95.
Is there any need to introduce this painter, sculptor and printmaker? A friend of the Surrealists in Paris and the Automatists in Montreal, Riopelle had an exceptional career, marked by his mosaics of the 1950s, his Homage to Rosa Luxemburg which occupies a full room at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Quebec and his canvases devoted to the geese at the end of his career. His meeting with Maurice Richard, on the initiative of La Presse, in 1990, led to the creation of a door on which the two men left traces of their hands. His work has been celebrated both in music (Riopelle symphonique) and on stage (Le projet Riopelle). Died March 12, 2002 at age 79.
Françoise Sullivan turned 100 on June 10, 2023. Painter, sculptor, choreographer and dancer, this great artist is known, among other things, for Danse dans la neige, an improvised solo in 1948 that Maurice Perron immortalized in photos (a film shot by Riopelle was been lost). Very prolific, Françoise Sullivan has also shared her art by teaching at Concordia University.
