We may begin with the proposition that for a moment during the 1940s Montreal painting was in the lead of the Parisian development of “Abstraction lyrique.” At least so thought the French critic and historian Michel Ragon, who in a retrospective assessment of the 1940s would maintain that, while there was no doubt that “Abstraction lyrique” was a fully formed movement by 1947, “if we were to take international activity into account we would realize…that the first lyrical abstract group in the world were neither Parisian, or from New York, but were Québécois.”

The Montrealers made their Parisian debut in June 1947 in an exhibition, Automatisme, organized by Fernand Leduc and Jean-Paul Riopelle for the Galerie du Luxembourg. Here Georges Mathieu perceived the usefulness of their work to support his initiative to define an opposition to geometric abstraction. When Mathieu invited Leduc and Riopelle to participate in his exhibition L’Imaginaire in the Galerie du Luxembourg at the end of 1947, he in effect subordinated Automatism to his own movement of lyric abstraction.

The Automatist story had begun in the early 1940s when, under Paul-Émile Borduas’ tutelage and leadership, a group of very young artists instigated their own revolution, re-formulating Surrealism in new terms. Theirs were developments that were no longer regional adaptations of already established European or American models, but original avant-garde adventures with their own thrust and integrity and continuity. The Montreal story has not been satisfactorily written into international art history.

“Breton alone stands incorruptible,” wrote Borduas in his inflammatory artistic manifesto Refus global, published in 1948. But the tribute was curiously empty, because long before Borduas composed his manifesto, from the very beginnings of the contacts between the Montrealers and the European Surrealists - begun in New York in 1945 and continued in Paris until a formal rupture with Breton occurred in 1948 - relationships had been uneasy and sometimes outrightly hostile. The reasons are as complex as were the factionalisms that ravaged the Surrealist movement itself in the immediate post-war years - in which Riopelle and Fernand Leduc were active participants - caused by competing artistic principles and by political disputes with the Communists and other party politics. If the Canadians on the one hand sought Breton’s recognition, on the other, they also were careful to defend their independence. If Breton failed them it was his incapacity to understand the essence of their work, to understand painting at all perhaps except as a handmaiden to literary expression, and certainly not as the pure painting they were aiming at. When Borduas’ formulated his paean to the Surrealist founder it was as if he were recalling the movement’s early beginnings, before, in Borduas’ own words in the Refus global, “the convulsive, transforming powers” of Breton’s originating visions were corrupted by “errors” and “false” intentions. For an interest in representation, or the expression of ideas or spiritual states, the Automatists substituted the immediate expressiveness of the sensate material of paint.