Artist Françoise Sullivan with an exhibition of her artwork at Galerie de l'UQAM in Montreal on May 10. She is a practicing contemporary artist, and one of the last surviving members of the Automatistes group of artists who revolutionized Quebec culture in the 1940s.Stephanie Foden/The Globe and Mail
Montreal artist Françoise Sullivan had a minor accident in her painting studio this year. She was trying to turn a large canvas on its side but couldn’t quite reach the top, and it fell over, bringing her down with it. A low table broke the fall, and she was uninjured, but she couldn’t right the canvas and had to wait until her son came over the next day to help.
This story might sound banal – except Sullivan turns 100 on Saturday. Barring snowstorms or the like, she still goes to her studio daily, and has been busy preparing for an October exhibition of new work at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. As far as anyone knows, she will be the oldest living artist to ever show at the museum.
“She comes to the studio with such lightness of heart,” said Stéphane Aquin, the MMFA director. “You want to grow old with that lightness; she hasn’t changed. … It’s an extraordinary way of being.”
In an 80-year career, Sullivan has lived through multiple artistic movements and reinvented her practice several times. Today, she is both a piece of living history – as one of the last surviving members of the Automatistes group of artists who revolutionized Quebec culture in the 1940s – and a practising contemporary artist.
“My painting has changed a bit from what it was before,” she said in a recent interview. “I’m just hoping that it will be refreshing for people to see something different from me.”
Sullivan, who has worked as a dancer, sculptor, experimental filmmaker, conceptual artist and painter, has been producing large geometric abstractions and monochromatic colour field paintings in recent decades, having returned to painting in the 1980s. Aquin suggests the new work is looser, describing it as “a free-flowing kind of abstraction that is about movement, colour and light.”
Aquin added: “She has a very direct and fresh outlook. It’s in keeping with the Automatiste spirit. She doesn’t come to painting doing 20 preparatory drawings. She just goes for it. They are very candid, very fresh and very direct. There is no second guessing.”
In 1948, a 25-year-old Sullivan had recently returned from studying modern dance in New York when she was approached to sign the Refus Global, the manifesto of artistic freedom issued by artist Paul-Émile Borduas. In the early 1940s, while studying painting at the École des Beaux Arts in Montreal, she had joined the artists, led by Borduas, who called themselves the Automatistes because they were inspired by the Surrealist notion of unconscious or automatic creativity.
Through his manifesto, Borduas was going public with the group’s philosophy of creative liberation and their criticisms of Quebec’s patriarchal, church-bound society. The publication, which lost him his teaching job, would mark the beginning of the province’s Quiet Revolution of social and cultural change.
Sullivan and designer Madeleine Arbour are the last two of the 16 signatories still alive, and she recalls feeling pressured to sign partly because the group looked at her slightly askance after her period in New York. She knew it was risky and, indeed, her father was “very angry. My mother, sweet and kind, said, ‘But she’s our daughter.’” Despite her hesitations, she contributed an essay to the publication about the liberating powers of dance, titled, La danse et l’espoir (Dance and Hope).
In the next decade, she would marry the artist and Second World War veteran Paterson Ewen; give birth to four sons; work as a choreographer at Radio-Canada in the new medium of television; and reinvent herself as a sculptor, using the unheated garage of her home as a studio.
“I can tell you I didn’t do very much during the fifties,” she said, when asked how she balanced motherhood with her career. “Then I thought, well, Paterson was painting. He was sort of beginning because he had been in the army, and I thought: ‘I feel like doing sculpture, which I barely learned at art school. But that doesn’t matter: I can do it.’ So I decided to get the instruments I needed and I tried my hand.”
Sullivan, who turns 100 on Saturday, holds her new book Une ligne imaginaire / An Imaginary Line. Over the course of her career, Sullivan has worked as a dancer, sculptor, experimental filmmaker, conceptual artist and painter.Stephanie Foden/The Globe and Mail
The result was a period of big, powerful geometric forms welded together from scrap metal and steel that rapidly established Sullivan as a leading Canadian modernist sculptor. They included Callooh Callay, a vertical stack of rectangles and circles in bright red that was commissioned for Expo 67.
This confidence in artistic experimentation – which Sullivan first learned during a middle-class and bilingual childhood where her parents encouraged her in amateur theatricals, enrolled her in dance lessons and eventually allowed her to attend art school – appears again and again in her career. As modernist painting and sculpture were replaced by conceptual, performance and video art in the 1970s, it would reinvigorate her art.
To mark her 100th birthday, the art gallery at the Université du Québec à Montréal is taking a look at her career in the 1970s, when she travelled to Italy and began experimenting with conceptual art.
“It’s part of her work we know the least,” said curator Louise Déry, who has published a catalogue about Sullivan in that decade, An Imaginary Line, and organized an online exhibition – a version of a physical show that was originally held in 2021. “I didn’t known there were so many art works to discover in her archives. It has opened the veil on the fact she is also an artist of the image, like a photographer or cinematographer. It’s new in how we approach her work.”
Sullivan first visited Europe for six weeks in the summer of 1970, entranced as soon as she crossed the frontier into Italy. In Rome, she found a place to stay near the Spanish Steps, walked into a nearby gallery at closing time and told the attendant she was interested in Arte Povera – the new Italian movement so named for its unconventional materials, both natural and industrial, and anti-corporatist stance. As luck would have it, there was a meeting of local artists that evening, and the gallerist invited Sullivan to join them.
Today, in a period when any medium goes and painting, revived during the 1980s, remains a legitimate choice, declarations that art was dead, or accusations that painting was merely elitist, may seem simplistic or even a bit quaint. However, Sullivan describes a very real anxiety in the 1970s about the future of art. Her marriage had broken up; she was a single mother to four teens and now her profession seemed threatened.
“I was reading the art magazines, Art Forum. There were serious articles by serious journalists. who would say, ‘Why do we need museums?’ I love museums. There are beautiful things there.”
So on her return to Montreal, she set out to examine the notion that the world outside the museum was somehow more authentic, creating her first conceptual piece. Walking from the MMFA to the Musée d’art contemporain, which in those days was located about five kilometres south in an Expo 67 gallery at the Cité du Havre, she developed some rules.
“I will take a photograph at every corner without any aesthetic choice and see what there is. I will walk to the museum and come back doing that. That took the whole day.”
It was a hot day in August, 1970, and reaching the Cité du Havre involved walking along an arterial road without a sidewalk. She was stopped by police officers who, hearing of her project, gave her a lift to safety.
The piece, Promenade entre le Musée d’art contemporain et le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, a series of photographs of Montreal street corners, is now in the MMFA collection. It was one of several artistic walks Sullivan created. Déry points out that these walks link back to her years as a dancer and, indeed, during this period, she began working as a choreographer again, creating new pieces for other dancers.
In 1975, during a year in Italy on a Canada Council grant with her four sons, she made a film of the five of them walking together in the Tuscan village where they often stayed, a work Déry found in her archives.
Sullivan had worked in film at the very beginning of her career, making a small movie with her mother on the family’s camera. Then, more famously, a few months before the Refus Global, she danced in the snow at the base of Mount St. Hilaire with artist Jean-Paul Riopelle behind the camera. Danse dans la niege is still considered a seminal work: It was included in the Metropolitan Museum’s major survey of Surrealism in 2021 in New York.
This cross-disciplinary and collaborative approach, with two visual artists working together to make a dance film, feels highly contemporary, but was central to the way the Automatistes worked to turn Surrealism’s agenda of the unconsciousness into a functioning project across all media.
“They were sharing aspirations to redefine the world, they would contribute to the projects of each other,” Déry said. “It was natural for Sullivan to imagine art in a larger perspective than the specific disciplines. … Such a long life can allow two or three careers. What will be the next one?”