Following the success of Abstract Painting in Canada comes an introduction to the Automatistes, Canada's first avant-garde art movement Young and innovative, Montreal's Automatistes revolutionized painting in the 1940s. Living in the restrictive Quebec of the Duplessis years, painters, dancers and writers-led by Paul-Emile Borduas and inspired by the Surrealists-found freedom of expression in abstraction pursued through automatism: an instinctive, unpremeditated form of creating art. On August 9, 1948, the Automatiste painters published Refus global, a call for the right to live and make art spontaneously and freely. The group would be acclaimed internationally-due largely to Jean-Paul Riopelle. Sixty years later, the Automatiste legacy is alive in Jean-Paul Mousseau's murals, Marcelle Ferron's stained glass works, Claude Gauvreau's plays and Francoise Sullivan, Francoise Riopelle and Jeanne Renaud's dances. Sumptuously illustrated, The Automatiste Revolution accompanies the first comprehensive exhibition in English Canada devoted to the Automatistes' works.

Roald Nasgaard (MA, University of British Columbia; PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Professor of Art History, and, for the past decade, Chair of the Art Department at Florida State University, began his teaching career at the University of Guelph in 1971. In the years between, before returning to academia, he had a long and distinguished museum career. From 1975 to 1978 he served as Curator of Contemporary Art and then, until 1993, as Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Among the many exhibition catalogues he authored are Yves Gaucher: A Fifteen-Year Perspective (1979); Structures for Behaviour: New Sculptures by Robert Morris, David Rabinowich, Richard Serra and George Trakas (1978); The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940 (1984); Gerhard Richter: Paintings (1988); and Pleasures of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Painting Since 1990 (2001). Other major curatorial projects at the AGO include The European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today (1985) and Free Worlds: Metaphors and Realities in Contemporary Hungarian Art. Nasgaard has held several Canada Council fellowships and grants as well as a Research Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives (2002). He won an OAAG Curatorial Writing Award in 1991 for his essay in Individualités: 14 Contemporary Artists from France. Nasgaard was born in Denmark and is a Canadian citizen.

Roald Nasgaard's profile page

Ray Ellenwood, professor emeritus and senior scholar at York University in Toronto, is an award-winning translator and author. He writes and publishes extensively about the Automatistes.

Ray Ellenwood's profile page