Ray Ellenwood is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at York University in Toronto. He is a long time friend to both Pierre Gauvreau and Janine Carreau, as well as the author of numerous volumes of translation of French Canadian literature, including the Automatist manifesto, Refus global. He won the Canada Council Translation Prize for his translation of Entrails, a book of dramatic objects by the surrationalist poet and brother of Pierre Gauvreau, Claude Gauvreau. Ellenwood is also the author of Egregore: The Montreal Automatist Movement, and co-author of The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941-1960. In November 1998, he organized a symposium, exhibition and concert at York University to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Refus global, and he continues to write and publish extensively about the Automatists.
Ray Ellenwood will be curating the Art = Liberation Exhibition running September 28 – Spring 2012 at the Baron Gallery.
Link to Life in Bright Colours: Pierre Gauvreau and Janine Carreau written by Ray Ellenwood.
Obituary Article for Pierre Gauvreau by Ray Ellenwood
PIERRE GAUVREAU, A MAJOR FIGURE OF QUEBEC MODERNISM
“For Pierre Gauvreau, the role of painting is to express, confront, provoke, and advance thought.”
-Jeanette Biondi
Just weeks ago his recent paintings hung in the Michel-Ange Gallery in Montreal, alongside works by his old friends Marcel Barbeau and Fernand Leduc. He was there for the launch on February 17th, and again on the 20th, against his doctor’s wishes because he’d had a leg amputated in October and his whole circulatory system was bad. But he sat in his wheelchair for almost two hours each time, basking in the show, joking about feeling like a sports star with all the sudden attention. He was actually able to do some painting in his studio as late as March. This was a man who’d had a major bypass operation complicated by a stroke in 1995, who found relief from almost constant pain by creating bright, youthful, vibrant canvases, even after he’d given up writing scripts for television.
Pierre Gauvreau was born in Montreal in 1922 and lived there all his life except for a brief time in the England with the armed forces in 1945-46. Beginning in 1941, he was part of a circle of young artists from various disciplines who gravitated around the painter, Paul-Émile Borduas. They were dubbed “The Automatists” by newspaper reporters in the months before the publication of their manifesto, Refus global (1948), a document widely recognized as a crucial expression of Quebec modernism and of the unrest that would eventually lead to the so-called quiet revolution. Pierre Gauvreau was very active in the production of the manifesto and eventually in defending it publicly against attacks by the clergy and newspaper columnists. In her biography, Jeanette Biondi calls him the angry young man, no doubt because of his life-long combat, in all the media he could muster, against what one commentator called “liberticidal ideologues” in the worlds of politics, religion, education, and the arts.
After his marriage to a fellow signatory of Refus global, Madeleine Arbour, in 1949, and knowing he would have difficulty surviving as a painter of abstract, avant-garde works, Pierre entered the world of public broadcasting as an announcer with the radio station CHLP, which led to other jobs in radio and
eventually to television in its early stages with both Radio-Canada and Radio-Québec. Soon after the birth of their first child, Madeleine Arbour also began a highly successful career in children’s television before concentrating on design. Pierre had a short stint with the National Film Board but then returned to television as a freelancer. By the mid-fifties, he was showing his paintings energetically at every opportunity in Montreal, as well as writing articles on art for the Journal Musical Canadien, while pursuing his career in television. Meanwhile, other painters of the Automatist group, such as Jean-Paul Riopelle, Fernand Leduc, Marcel Barbeau, Marcelle Ferron and Borduas had left, or were preparing to leave, for Paris or New York.
As a director and producer in television, Pierre Gauvreau was involved with shows that are classics in the history of the medium in his home province, such as Pépinot et Capucine, the puppet show that a generation of children grew up on, and the epic historical series Radisson and D’Iberville. There were documentaries on the women of rural Quebec, and a thirty-part series on folk artists of the province (which had a liberating impact on his own painting and led to a fabulous collection of work by “spontaneous” artists adorning every corner of his house and garden), but he is best known for having written the scripts of three very popular television serials: Le Temps d’une paix (1979-1986), Cormoran (1991-1993), and Le Volcan tranquille (1997-1998). Although Gauvreau was never a nationalist in the conservative tradition, he early realized the importance of the electronic media for the preservation of the language and culture of Québec, and his commitment to the popular media was a counterweight and complement to the formal abstraction of his painting. It’s no accident that his television trilogy covers Quebec history leading up to and following Refus global, with the same issues of oppression, fear, and liberation. Le temps d’une paix was especially popular, running to 135 episodes, and is still being broadcast.
At the height of his involvement in electronic media, Gauvreau’s painting slowed and eventually stopped for a time, and he often lamented the fact that friends who knew of his work in one medium knew nothing of the other. But he was committed to painting for over seventy years, and it was his main obsession at the end of his life. Like many painters of his generation, he began showing his work in his apartment, or in cafés, bookstores or school auditoriums before graduating to galleries at home and abroad. He was represented in major group shows, locally and internationally, starting in the mid-forties. His work was present at the historic exhibition of Canadian painting in Spoleto in 1962, and again a few weeks later in an exclusively Automatist show in Rome. There was also the “Borduas et les automatistes” exhibitions in Paris and Montreal in 1971-72 and, most recently, the “Automatiste Revolution” exhibition at Ontario’s Varley Gallery and New York’s Albright-Knox Gallery in 2009-10.
Over the years, Gauvreau had individual showings in numerous galleries in Victoria, Toronto, Kingston, and across the province of Quebec. But surprisingly, except for solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal in 1979, and at the Musée du Québec in 1981, the large public galleries seemed reluctant to offer him a major retrospective. One wonders if this had to do with his second career, or the fact that he was always slightly out of tune with his friends and fellow-painters, not so quick to move into all-over abstraction, never entirely giving up his brush for a pallet knife or a roller, often humorously juxtaposing the conventions of gestural, colour field and hard edge painting while never committing to one style. The carnivalesque use of colour and materials in his late paintings may give conservative curators pause, but it seems to appeal strongly to young viewers.
From 1960 to 1975, during the height of his work in film and television, Gauvreau lived with Monique Lepage, a stage and screen actress and theatre director. Together, they bought a country property in Abercorn that allowed him to show his talents as a carpenter. This setting in the Eastern Townships
played a large part in the photographic and film documentaries of his life and no doubt had an effect on his artwork. In 1976, he began a relationship with his third wife, Janine Carreau (painter/photographer and companion to the end) with whom he eventually developed another country property where they indulged in a common great obsession: gardening. It was in these years that he returned to painting with a rush of energy, producing truly large-scale works for the first time, including, for example, a folding screen made of four, 4!8 plywood panels, brightly painted, cut and collaged on both sides.
As Gauvreau’s agent, Janine Carreau worked to promote his work as well as producing and exhibiting her own. They often showed together and, in 1994, began an impressive series of collaborative works, stimulated by the well-known film-maker and self-taught artist, Charles Binamé. These were variations on the Surrealist game of cadavre exquis, where different players provide parts of a sentence or a drawing without seeing what others have contributed. From drawings to paintings to large, three-dimensional works in various media, these exquisite corpses grew and grew, involving family and friends of all ages and all walks of life, while Janine Carreau developed a system that seems to have truly revolutionized the game. Quantities of these works have been shown in the ensuing years, notably at an exhibition of over 150 collaborative pieces entitled “Célébrer la vie”, organized by Carreau, held during an international conference on heart disease not long after Gauvreau had his bypass. Since then, there have been a number of joint exhibitions, mostly of Gauvreau and Carreau but also of Gauvreau and his daughter Annick.
Plans were afoot to have a major exhibition of Pierre Gauvreau and Janine Carreau in Vancouver in 2011. It was to begin with an intimate exhibition of works by both artists in the Baron Gallery in August. In October and November the plan was to expand into the wide-open spaces of the Pendulum gallery for a retrospective exhibition devoted to Pierre Gauvreau, especially including some of his largest pieces. Rosemary Baron Swingle reports that Gauvreau’s death has caused that project to be postponed, but it will be launched again around this time next year. Pierre Gauvreau died on Thursday, April 7. Le Devoir had a front-page picture of him with articles spread over three pages in their weekend edition of April 9-10, while other newspapers and the French- language media in general made much of him. There was an intimate gathering of friends at his studio in the Eastern Townships on Sunday, April 10, and on May 15, there was a large public commemoration at Montréal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, with readings and testimonials by friends and colleagues, including some of Québec’s best-known actors and performers.
-Ray Ellenwood