Les Automatistes

Les Automatistes were a group of Québécois artistic dissidents from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The movement was founded in the early 1940s by painter Paul-Émile Borduas. Les Automatistes were so called because they were influenced by Surrealism and its theory of automatism. Members included Marcel Barbeau, Roger Fauteux, Claude Gauvreau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Guy Borremans, Marcelle Ferron and Françoise Sullivan. The movement may have begun with an exhibition Borduas gave in Montreal in 1942. Held at the Ermitage, an exhibition hall owned by the Collège de Montréal, the show featured gouaches that illustrated the artist's experimentation with non-figurative painting. Initially, les Automatistes exhibited in makeshift venues, since no commercial gallery was willing to show the work of all the members. However, the group was soon being exhibited in Paris and New York also. Though it began as a visual arts group, it also spread to other forms of expression, such as drama, poetry and dance. The title "les Automatistes" came from journalist Tancrède Marcil Jr., in a review of their second exhibit in Montreal (February 15 to March 1, 1947), which appeared in Le Quartier Latin (the Université de Montréal's student journal). In 1948, Borduas published a collective manifesto called the Refus global, an important document in the cultural history of Quebec and a declaration of artistic independence and the need for expressive freedom.¶

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Les Automatistes is Canadian art group, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 8 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶