LIFELONG CREATIVITY
Sullivan’s work celebrated
It’s been 70 years since a group of young Québécois artists calling themselves Les Automatistes lit a torch in the Grande Noirceur of the Duplessis era with their collective manifesto Refus global. It’s generally agreed it was the spark that ignited not just Québécois but Canadian modern art. Among the writers and signatories was the group’s last surviving member, Françoise Sullivan, whose spectacular and multi-faceted career — dancer, choreographer, sculptor, painter, photographer — is receiving a major retrospective at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal to mark the publication of Refus global in 1948. Sullivan met up with the Montreal Gazette in the restaurant of the MAC, accompanied by her assistant, while showing some friends around her exhibition. That exhibition, simply called Françoise Sullivan, features early and uncharacteristically figurative paintings, wrought iron sculptures, elegant Plexiglas spirals, archival documents, films and photographs. There also are examples of her latest works — vast, vibrantly colourful canvases that represent her ongoing struggle to solve the problems of minimalist and abstract art. At 95, Sullivan, incredibly, still paints every day in her Point St-Charles studio — usually, she says, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. “It could be 6 p.m. sometimes, occasionally 7 p.m. I have periods when I’m not painting a lot, like now.” She looks almost chastened that she’s been taking time off, though “taking time off” largely means doing the gruelling media rounds. And, she adds, eyes glittering with enthusiasm, “when I’m not painting, I’m getting my bearings, ready to get into something bigger.” Sullivan’s contribution to Refus global was an essay called La danse et l’espoir, a rallying cry for spontaneity and intuitiveness. The centrality of dance to Sullivan’s oeuvre is made clear by her unhesitating answer to the question as to which part of the exhibition is closest to her heart. “I’m afraid it’s the first piece, Danse dans la neige,” she says, as if apologizing to all the exhibits of the intervening 70 years for passing them over, “because that was really going into the unknown. It was a time when I was trying to paint abstract, and it wasn’t coming. I thought: I can do it in dance, by just letting it flow. It was all about emptying my mind. Attempting to get to the abstract through dancing. I thought that I was doing it with painting thoughts.” This iconic outdoor solo performance, which took place in Otterburn Park, was captured on film by Jean-Paul Riopelle, and in stills by photographer Maurice Perron. Now only the stills survive, the film since lost. Having trained in classical dance during her teens, Sullivan continued experimenting, pushing at the stifling boundaries of Duplessis-era conservatism. In the same year that Refus global appeared, she took part in a dance recital with several choreographers at what is now McGill University’s Chancellor Day Hall. It is recognized as a foundational event in Quebec modern dance. So successful was Sullivan as a dancer and choreographer that she soon was creating works for television. And just three years ago, she danced (albeit seated) for choreographer Paul-André Fortier in a piece created as part of the activities accompanying the Do It Montréal exhibition at Galerie de l’UQAM. (Another UQAM connection is Montagne, her 1996 granite wall piece created for the university’s science complex.) By 1959, however, she had turned her attention to sculpture, mostly for practical reasons; she was by then the single parent of four sons. “Dance had become impossible for me,” she says, “because you had to rehearse, continue being in shape, sometimes travel as part of the company. If there was television, you were there morning till midnight. So I felt, ‘Well, I can do something else.’ “But sculpture is the same creative impulse for me.” It is, she says, “in three dimensions, like dance.” Having been a working artist for more than 70 years, it would be understandable if the firebrand participant of the revolutionary Refus global had since become set in her ways. Sullivan’s restlessness and constant reinvention of her art has resisted that. “I’ve been through periods when it was declared that art was dead,” Sullivan says. “There were many critics writing (at the end of the ’60s) that it was finished, that we don’t need galleries. I suffered a lot through all that period, because I thought art was so important.” Referring to the periodic pronouncements on the death of painting, Sullivan says: “I’ve decided that I’ve seen enough great painting done recently that it cannot be dead.” As for her long struggle with the problems of abstract painting, she believes her latest works have brought her closer to a solution than she’s ever been. “It took a long time to arrive at something. It’s been difficult. I think I’m there now.” She looks thoughtful, then adds with a delighted smile: “Yes, yes … I could be.” Refus global is just one of the thousands of artistic and political manifestos humanity has bombarded us with over the centuries. Berlin-based artist Julian Rosefeldt gives us just a small sample of them in his remarkable installation Manifesto, which features actress Cate Blanchett playfully transforming herself into various personas — a homeless man, an anchorwoman, a ballet mistress, a punk singer, a puppeteer (operating, creepily enough, a little Blanchett puppet) and so on. Manifesto consists of a dozen or so 10-minute films, fluidly and imaginatively shot in and around Berlin (Kubrick and Antonioni are heavy influences), each featuring Blanchett in unlikely scenarios delivering the words of a famous manifesto. One of the funniest is a teacher cheerfully laying down Lars von Trier’s Dogme rules on a class of preteens. Unfortunately, we don’t get the words of Françoise Sullivan nor those of Paul-Émile Borduas, nor of any of their fellow Automatistes. But there is a greatest hits of famous (and not so famous) names, including Kandinsky, André Breton, Barnett Newman and, of course, Marx and Engels. Manifesto, which toured in Australia, Berlin and New York, was also released as a feature film. But you have to experience the installation to get the full heady effect of its Babel of -isms, all simultaneously spoken and all seemingly in contention, except for one startling moment in which the brilliant, multifarious performances of its Oscar-winning star suddenly align.