Painter’s relentless artistic search comes to an end
MONTREAL— Two weeks before his death this month at the age of 90, Quebec abstract painter Marcel Barbeau made his last trip to the art store in Montreal to buy brushes, thoroughly examining the coarseness and texture of the instruments before adding them to his basket.
Back at his studio and hobbled by Parkinson’s disease, one of the founders of Les Automatistes, the influential art movement launched in 1940s Montreal, had assistants set out his canvases and arrange his paints just so, so he could continue his life’s work.
That work, which numbers more than 3,000 canvases and sculptures created and displayed across Canada, the United States and Europe, was ever changing.
It began in the garage of his family’s Montreal home where he and friend Jean-Paul Riopelle created a style that recalls — and actually predates by several months — Jackson Pollock’s iconic drip paintings. It includes performance-art pieces inspired by music and poetry, optical art and, later, colourful, geometric, minimalist pieces.
“He was not in a static universe. He couldn’t see himself eternally reproducing the same motifs,” said his widow, Ninon Gauthier, an art historian and sociologist. “He said: ‘Why? Would a scientist reproduce the same experiments? A researcher continues their search.’ ”
That insistence on exploring new ground was at once Barbeau’s calling card and the source of his eternal frustration.
It was as one of the 15 signatories of Paul-Émile Borduas’s 1948 manifesto Refus Global that his career took off while still in his early 20s. The anticlerical screed called for Quebec to cast off the shackles of the Catholic Church, which occupied an important role in politics, education and the private lives of the predominantly Roman Catholic Quebecois population.
Refus Global is considered the spark that ignited Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, a transition that brought the province into modernity, but also kicked off decades of political instability brought by the Quebec sovereignty movement.
In Les enfants de Refus global, a 1998 documentary produced by Barbeau’s daughter, Manon Barbeau, the painter said the manifesto was driven less by political courage and more by the elemental needs of a group that also included dancers, poets and designers.
“It was a need to breathe that we had. It wasn’t really related to an established political movement. It was more like an anarchistic act. It was against a very rigid, closed social structure,” Barbeau said.
Barbeau would live a nomadic existence, going between Vancouver, Paris, New York and California in the years between 1957 and 1974, before returning to live in Quebec. During a September 1968 visit to Montreal, Barbeau would meet and fall in love with Gauthier, a young student working on her master’s degree in sociology. In the late 1990s and already in his early 70s, Barbeau moved back to Paris with Gauthier, that time for 17 years, before returning one last time to his hometown.
Behind his temperamental and sometimes distant facade hid a sensitive, poetic and rigorous man who loved music and dance, two artistic disciplines that he often incorporated into his own performances.
Roald Nasgaard, a former chief curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and retired art professor at Florida State University, remembered one such performance at the AGO in Toronto in which Barbeau painted to music, dancing in front of the canvas.
“I confess that I wasn’t sure what to make of it,” he said. “I think there was a lot of it at that point, but that doesn’t matter because it was a long career and to sustain a long career is remarkable in itself.”
The accolades came. In 1995, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Three years later, Canada Post issued a series of stamps to honour Les Automatistes, including Barbeau’s 1946 painting Le tumulte à la mâchoire crispée.
But internationally, Barbeau’s work was sometimes overshadowed by contemporaries in cultural hubs such as Paris and New York, said Nasgaard.
“It’s one of those dilemmas of being from a small country and not having the publicity machine,” he said.
More frustrating was that the significant markers of artistic recognition in this country — the Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts and Quebec’s Prix Paul-Émile Borduas — would elude him until 2013. Supporters put this slight down to the fact that he was in constant evolution, never reaching an artistic plateau that would allow critics to finally sum up his career.
It was only last June that he was named an officer of the Order of Quebec, the highest honour in the province he helped force into modernity.
The disappointment was unavoidable, Gauthier said, because Barbeau viewed his paintings and sculptures as a gesture of love for the public. He expected a response, stemming from “a desire to communicate that was very strong within him.”
But he also managed to mellow in his final years, said Manon Barbeau.
“The longer he continued, the more he found joy from his painting without hoping for anything more than the joy of painting.” En Scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. Email: awoods@thestar.ca