Author Description

This volume provides the Anglophone reader for the first time with the writings of Paul-Émile Borduas in a French original and English translation version. Borduas, the painter from Montreal, who has to be the considered as one of the most vital figures of painting in the ’40s and ’50s in Canada, has been an equally industrious writer of manifestoes and pamphlets. The "Refus Global", which caused his dismissal from a professorial position in Montreal and his emigration to New York, is here published for the first time in a facsimile version of the original and English translation. The writings represent an interesting and valuable source of North American art history: the reception of surrealism, the antagonism and transition from Ecole de Paris dominance to New York School painting, seen through a Canadian artist's mind, who is equally close to both historical and cultural situations, and the advanced thougt of Borduas on forthcoming problems of separatism as a general political problem of Canada and regionalism as a specific artists’ problem occurring in all parts of the world.