Marcel Barbeau

Biography

The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec holds Marcel Barbeau’s painting “Le Rivage” (1950): oil on canvas, 11.9 by 15.2 centimetres, smaller than a postcard. The same museum has his “Kitchenombi, nº 4” (1972), acrylic on canvas measuring 260.7 by 389.3 centimetres.

He was born on 18 February 1925 in Montreal.

From 1942 to 1947 Barbeau studied furniture design at the École du meuble in Montreal. Drawing there was taught by Paul-Émile Borduas, and through him the young man discovered modern art. From 1944 to 1953 he frequented Borduas’s studio, where young artists and writers gathered, the future core of the Automatiste group; they, like Barbeau himself, were absorbed by psychoanalysis and the unconscious. In the autumn of 1945 and the winter of 1946, in his “Atelier de la ruelle”, he and Jean-Paul Riopelle, with whom he then shared a studio, made Canada’s first experiments in abstract expressionism, in painting and in sculpture. He dripped paint from a brush or a string, left the marks of brush and palette knife, scratched into the fresh layer with a knife, and in places applied the paint thickly. Some canvases are covered with texture from edge to edge, without a centre (the so-called all-over composition), and this put him in the front rank of the avant-garde of the day. He worked in this manner until the end of the 1950s. The manifesto “Refus global” came out on 8 August 1948, and Barbeau was among the signatories: like the others, he wanted to be free of ready-made forms, in painting and beyond it.

The group soon broke up. Riopelle left for Paris, Borduas for New York, some of his comrades went over to the Plasticiens, and Barbeau set out to find an abstraction of his own. In 1952 he showed small non-objective works in ink in New York and exhibited in Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City. In 1957 he went back to drawing from the model and took up calligraphy; his “phonic calligraphies” of 1957–1960 were inspired by the poems of his friend, the poet Claude Gauvreau. Drawing and collage remained his main work until 1961.

In 1962–1964 he lived in Paris, in 1964–1968 in New York, and there he painted Op Art. His optical illusions, it seems to me, are still far from the scientific calculation of the concrete artists and neoplasticists with whom he was then exhibiting. In Montreal he was shown by the Galerie du Siècle, and in 1969 the Winnipeg Art Gallery, together with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, organised a retrospective of his work.

From then on he moved beyond painting more and more often. His collages turned into paintings, prints and sculptures. The sculptures of 1971–1977 look like drawings thrown into space, while the works of 1985–1992 resemble small shelters, almost architecture. From 1972 to 1980 he staged performances: he painted in front of an audience together with musicians, dancers and actors, while photographers and film-makers recorded these actions so that something of them would remain. In the mid-1980s came his “phonic chants”, and in 1999 he created a choreography for the opening of his exhibition at Domaine Cataraqui. For many years he lived now in various parts of Canada, now in France, the United States and Switzerland, and only in July 2008 did he return to Montreal. In a 2010 interview he said that when he paints he does not look for an emotion: the forms on the canvas themselves want to live together.

Most of his honours came in the last twenty years of his life. In 1995 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada; in 1998 one of his works was reproduced on a stamp in the series issued for the fiftieth anniversary of “Refus global”; in 2013 he received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas; in 2015 he was admitted to the Ordre national du Québec. In 2000 his daughter, the film-maker Manon Barbeau, made a film about him, “Barbeau, libre comme l’art”. Barbeau’s works are in the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and many public and corporate collections.

Marcel Barbeau died on 2 January 2016 in Montreal. His archive is held by the Université du Québec à Montréal, and in 2018–2019 the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec showed the exhibition “Marcel Barbeau. En mouvement”.