Claude Roussel

Biography

In 1944 the fourteen-year-old Claude Roussel showed Paul Carmel Laporte a small wooden plaque, “Trout”, carved with nothing but a file. Laporte, a pioneer of the visual arts in Madawaska, saw a future sculptor in the boy.

Roussel was born on 6 July 1930 in Edmundston, New Brunswick. He began carving wood at ten. Under Laporte’s guidance he mastered the techniques of wood carving, and in 1947, aged seventeen and in the year he finished school in Edmundston, he held his first solo exhibition.

From 1950 to 1956 he studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal: in 1955 he received a diploma in drawing instruction, and in 1956 a diploma in sculpture. The Quebec movements of the time, Refus Global and the Automatistes, influenced him: he admired them, and he also took up their expressive means, bold colour and abstract forms. In 1961 a fellowship from the Canada Council for the Arts allowed him to travel to Europe, where he was interested above all in architectural decoration in England, France, Italy and Spain.

On returning to his home town he became the first professional artist to teach art in the public schools of New Brunswick. From 1959 to 1961 he worked at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, the first Francophone in a curatorial position. When the appointment was announced, Lord Beaverbrook said that young Roussel would give the gallery a link with the Acadian culture of the region. There, in 1959, Roussel made his first monumental work, “The Beavers”, in limestone. The Government of New Brunswick presented it to Beaverbrook for his eightieth birthday; it now stands in Officer’s Square in Fredericton. In 1963, at the invitation of Clément Cormier, founder and vice-chancellor of the Université de Moncton, and thanks to a special grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, Roussel became the first artist-in-residence and was given the task of developing a visual arts curriculum. He founded the Visual Arts Department and directed it from 1963 to 1971 and again from 1976 to 1979. From 1964 to 1967 he directed the university’s art gallery, which he also founded. In 1964 he showed there the Canadian masters Borduas, Pellan, Riopelle and Dumouchel, and then organized the first two major exhibitions of Acadian artists, “Selection 65” and “Selection 67”. He worked at the university for twenty-nine years, until 1992. He was a member of the Maritime Education Foundation and the Jack Chambers Memorial Foundation, and until 1991 he chaired the Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen Acquisition Fund at the university gallery. From 1971 to 1976 he was the founding president of Canadian Artists Representation (CARFAC) for New Brunswick.

His monumental work ran alongside his teaching. The Escuminac Disaster Monument (limestone, 1959–1969) stands at the provincial historic site. “Éros” (welded Corten steel, 1971) is at the Université de Moncton, and “Atlantic” (steel and epoxy, 1976) was made for the 1976 Olympic Games and installed in Kingston, Ontario. “Dina Bolts” (1988) is in the Olympic sculpture garden in Seoul. Later works include the monument to Father Clément Cormier (bronze, 1990), the “Moncton 100” monument (1990), the monument to Mother Marie Léonie in Memramcook (2004) and “Inspire-Action”, in welded steel, in Dieppe (2017). His work was shown in more than two hundred solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad.

Honours came from 1964: a medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, commemorative medals, the Order of Canada in 1984, the Order of New Brunswick in 2002, and in 2005 the Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for High Achievement in the Arts. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

In February 1992 Roussel retired and settled in Cap-Pelé, where he worked in his studio. He died in Moncton on 28 May 2025, aged ninety-four.