A very different vision of life and art in Canada was created by Paul-Émile Borduas, a French-Canadian painter and sculptor. Borduas is best known for his abstract paintings. Today, his paintings are seen as important works which signalled the beginning of a general change in Canadian painting. As an abstract artist, Borduas did not always win public approval. In fact, in his day, his art and ideas were viewed as radical and, by some, dangerous. In 1948 he was fired from his job as a drawing instructor at the École de Meuble in Montreal after he published a manifesto called Refus Global (Total Refusal) which was heavily critical of French-Canadian culture. Even today the abstract quality of Borduas's art can cause confusion upon first viewing his paintings.

Borduas's art can be called abstract art because it does not often depict a recognizable subject. Unlike Emily Carr or the Group of Seven, whose paintings interpreted the Canadian scene but who still painted recognizable subjects (mountains, lakes, totems, etc.), Borduas's paintings often do not depict any recognizable subject at all. To those seeing it for the first time, abstract art often appears to be little more than a jumble of lines and shapes and colours. But it is important to note that the subjects Borduas was trying to paint were not physical objects (like totems or landscapes). Instead, Borduas was looking for a new, less conventional way of envisioning culture and society. He was attempting to paint what we might call the non- material world: emotions, feelings, sensations.

Borduas was born in St.-Hilaire which was, at the time of his childhood, a rural village outside of Montreal. As a child, Borduas wanted to be an artist, but his family could not afford to send him to art school. Instead he was apprenticed to a local church decorator named Ozias Leduc. An apprenticeship is a form of education in which a young student -- called an apprentice -- works with a master artist or craft worker in order to develop their skills. Leduc took a deep interest in his pupil and by all accounts Borduas received an excellent education. Borduas worked on-the-job with Leduc and then eventually attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal on a scholarship which the older man had secured for him. After finishing his courses, Borduas continued his education in Europe, studying for two years in France with important and skilled religious artists. His education completed in 1932, Borduas returned to Canada where he hoped to follow in Leduc's footsteps and become a church decorator.

It was not to be. In the 1930s an economic depression plagued Canada; unemployment was very high and few people had money to afford art. This included the church and local congregations. Unable to find work in his chosen field, Borduas turned to teaching and began to work at the École de Meuble as a drawing instructor. His time in Montreal pushed Borduas toward more radical conceptions of art. His master, Leduc, had been an early supporter of a type of art called Nabis which attempted to tie religious and abstract art together. He conveyed this idea to Borduas who studied with Nabis artists when he was in France. In Canada, however, abstract art was not very popular with the general public. In order to increase the popularity of abstract art, a group of Montreal artists created the Contemporary Arts Society (CAS) in the late 1930s and Borduas found himself attracted to this group. He became a member of its executive and quickly developed into a strong a vocal supporter of new artistic ideas.

In fact, Borduas's ideas were more radical than most of the other members of the CAS. The CAS wanted to increase the popularity of abstract art, but Borduas had other ideas. He became the leader of a group of young, very radical French-Canadian artists who called themselves automatistes, a term referring to a certain conception of art. Borduas felt that artistic expression should be automatic; that the artist would not go through the normal process of deciding what to paint, making sketches, and then slowly creating a finished canvas in their studio. Instead, Borduas felt that artists should paint rapidly without any forethought, design, or even specific intentions as to what they were going to paint. They should paint automatically, letting their feelings and emotions flood out onto the canvas. The goal of automatic painting was not to create a beautiful picture, but to express the artist's sub-conscious feelings and impulses.

At the time Borduas enunciated these ideas, French-Canadian society was more conservative than it is today. Quebec's educational system was still dominated by the Catholic Church. Ideas which were deemed radical were rejected. Social views in Quebec were complex, but they tended to reflect the views of the church. In this context, Borduas's ideas and art were, indeed, very radical. In Refus Global, Borduas explicitly challenged the authority of the Catholic Church, described Quebec's government as corrupt, and characterized French Canadians as a small people held in a state of slavery by their own fear of the outside world. Instead of living this way, Borduas called on French Canadians to reject authority, embrace their sub-conscious impulses, and live spontaneously. They should, he said, abandon their old culture and create a new one based on emotion, sensuality, and what he called "magic".

According to Borduas, art was centrally important to the creation of this new culture because art was inherently creative. Art, for Borduas, was not simply about depicting scenes. It was about creating new things. By painting "automatically" one helped to make visible a new culture based on emotions and feelings. One painting which illustrates the automatist style of painting is No. 12 or The Bottled Condor, painted around 1942. It was painted with gouache, a thin medium which allowed Borduas to paint rapidly in an automatic manner. The title of this painting, as the art historian François-Marc Gagnon has pointed out, was chosen after it was painted. Titles for automatist paintings were not selected before a work was completed because the idea was to paint without any preconceptions of what was being painted. The title itself does seem to refer to a painting which might depict, as Gagnon suggests, a bird which has been placed in a bottle, but it is difficult to tell exactly what this painting is really about. Perhaps it is an effort to portray the darker side of Borduas's new culture.

Borduas's art was also subject to dramatic shifts in style. He painted in a variety of ways throughout his life, moving from one style to another. The painting L'etoile noir, completed in 1957, is a later work which illustrates this. By 1957, Borduas had been fired and had left Canada, living first in New York, and then in Paris. Like The Bottled Condor, it is difficult to tell exactly what this painting is meant to depict, but by the time Borduas had painted this work he had abandoned the idea that spontaneously created art could help create a new culture. In the 1940s, when he first developed his automatiste artistic philosophy, Borduas looked to the future with hope. By the 1950s, when it became evident to him that his hoped-for new culture was not going to develop, he became increasingly disillusioned. He seems to have abandoned the idea that it was even possible to change culture. In one of his last written works, Borduas referred to humanity as "slaves" and wondered how he could have had faith in ordinary people. It is possible that the starkness of L'etoile noir reflected the starkness of Borduas' own feelings.

Perhaps he had reason to be unhappy. He had lost his job and felt that he needed to leave Canada in order to truly develop as an artist. Nevertheless, Borduas's art did signal the beginning of a new era in Canadian art. After the development of automatisme, Canadian art was not the same. The differences between L'etoile noir or The Bottled Condor and the art of the Group of Seven or Emily Carr are self-evident. The development of abstract art in Canada was a complicated process. Artists like Borduas failed to create the new world they dreamed of creating, but they did change the ways in which artists painted and, for some at least, thought about the nature of art.