Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery Hosts Landmark Exhibit of Canadian Avante-Garde Art

By Doug Draper

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York – renown around the world for its displays of modern art – is featuring what it rightfully calls a “landmark exhibition” of Canada’s first avante-garde movement.

Following is the Gallery’s own take on this wonderful exhibit. This is one of the great art galleries you can visit and support in our greater binational region of Niagara. It is located in a grand old building off Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo near Delaware Park, with a scenic vista of a pond overlooking the former site of the Pan Am Exhibition of a century ago behind it. Go visit this fine gallery for this dynamic exhibit that runs from March 19 through May 30.

While there, enjoy all of the other art this gallery has to offer. Now Niagara At Large offers Albright-Knox’s own media release on the Canada art exhibit. You can read it all
and other details on the gallery by clicking on ‘keep reading’ at the end of this sentence.

On March 19, The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941–1960, a
landmark exhibition of works by Canada’s first avant-garde art movement, will open at the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

It is one of the most extensive exhibitions to date of the Automatiste Group, whose work created what is recognized today as the most interdisciplinary and possibly the most important art movement in Canada. The
Automatistes were the first artists to bring modernist painting to Canada and the first Canadian artists to embrace avant-garde gestural abstraction.

The opening at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery will represent the first time this important work
will be seen in a broad international context, with complementary works from the Albright-Knox’s Permanent Collection of the contemporaneous United States avant-garde, the Abstract Expressionists, also on view.

Major works by Jean-Paul Riopelle and Paul-Émile
Borduas will be complemented in context with work by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock,  and Mark Rothko from the internationally known collection of the Albright-Knox.
Guest curated by Roald Nasgaard, Professor of Art History at Florida State University, the
exhibition includes sixty works of art, as well as photographs, books, and other ephemera
documenting the history of the Automatiste movement. The United States exhibition will
also include a gallery of related works from the Gallery’s Permanent Collection designed to
illuminate the connections and relationships between these Canadian artists and their
American counterparts.

“The Gallery is looking forward to presenting the work of these remarkable artists, whose
breakthroughs were parallel to, but entirely independent of, the simultaneous Abstract
Expressionism movement in New York,” said Louis Grachos, Director of the Albright-Knox
Art Gallery. “It’s exciting to see these little-known artists in the U.S. for the first time,”
added Associate Curator Holly E. Hughes. Although a few of the Automatistes exhibited in
New York and Paris during the 1940s and 1950s, they remain largely unknown outside
Quebec.

The Automatistes gathered under the leadership of Paul-Émile Borduas in the early 1940s.
They were inspired by stream-of-consciousness writings of the time and approached their
works through an exploration of the subconscious.

The group of sixteen artists published Le Refus global (Total Refusal) in 1948. It became
one of the pillars of the Quiet Revolution, a period of intense change in Quebec. Le Refus
2 of 2 global was an anti-religious and anti-establishment manifesto—one of the most
controversial artistic and social documents in modern Quebec.

The Automatistes were not solely painters, but also included dancers, playwrights, poets, critics, and choreographers. After twenty years of challenging the politically and religiously repressive Quebec society, the Automatistes as a group disbanded in 1960 with the death of Borduas.
The exhibition was organized, and recently on view at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham,
Ontario. An accompanying publication, The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941–1960
(Douglas & McIntyre) has been co-authored by Roald Nasgaard and Automatiste historian
Ray Ellenwood and includes sixty color reproductions of works in the exhibition. The
exhibition and publication are supported by the Varley-McKay Art Foundation and private
donors.

The exhibition will open at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery on March 19, 2010, and remain on
view through May 30, 2010.

(Please click on www.niagaraatlarge for Niagara At Large and more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater binational Niagara region.)