Sullivan's movements: a major exhibition recently surveyed the diverse career of 78-year-old dancer, sculptor, painter and conceptual artist Francoise Sullivan - Report From Montreal - Biography

Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Ken Carpenter

Francoise Sullivan's retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts surveyed 63 years of work by this distinguished Canadian artist. Her career has been an extraordinarily varied one, encompassing dance, choreography, welded-metal sculpture, conceptual art, representational painting loosely based on Greek myths, collage, and most recently, at the very height of her powers, relatively monochromatic large-scale abstract painting. For Sullivan, abstraction was arguably the single most important development in 20th-century visual art, (1) and it remains not only a vital stimulus to creativity but also "a position of resistance" in the current climate that so often "denigrates" traditional mediums. (2)

In addition to the extensive catalogue for this retrospective (her third)--with its informative texts by the show's curator Stephane Aquin, art historian Gilles Lapointe and dance scholar Michele Febvre--a bilingual book, Fracoise Sullivan, The Painting Yet to Come, has been published by art historian Louise Dery in collaboration with painter Monique Regimbald-Zeiber. (3) The artist has also received two honorary doctorates and, at the age of 78, is clearly the doyenne of Canadian artists.

Sullivan first came to national attention in 1948 as a signator of the Automatist manifesto Le Refus global (Total Refusal), to which she contributed a seminal text on the nature and potential of modern dance ("Dance and Hope"). Le Refus global, a highly charged, rather poetic pamphlet written in protest against the stifling environment of Quebec during the regime of Premier Maurice Duplessis, is often cited as the single most important cultural document in the history of Canada. The central essay was by Paul-Emile Borduas, the innovative abstract painter who was the chief figure of the Automatists and who lost his job teaching at L'Ecole du Meuble as a direct consequence of his involvement with Le Refus.

The Automatists, a Montreal-based group parallel to the Abstract Expressionists, drew from many of the same sources (including Cubism, Matisse, Surrealist automatism, Freudian and Jungian theory) and came to maturity at about the same time. Borduas's breakthrough came with his celebrated "automatic" gouaches in 1942, the year that Gorky established his mature style; Marcel Bar beau made poured-and-spattered work (though not on a large scale) in 1947, the year that Pollock first immersed himself in that method.

By and large, the Automatists were more multidisciplinary than the Abstract Expressionists, with Sullivan perhaps the most eclectic of all. The group was closely connected to the worlds of theater, poetry, "sound poetry" and design. As Lapointe observes in his catalogue essay, Sullivan may have reacted against the influential Borduas, who focused primarily on painting, since she came to stand for "mixedness of genres, for polyvalency, and for the decompartmentalization of media."

Sullivan (b. 1925) was involved with the arts from an early age. She began taking dance lessons in her eighth year and read Leonardo's Treatise on Painting when she was around 12. By 1945, she was in New York, studying dance with Franziska Boas and, on occasion, Martha Graham.

On returning to Montreal in 1947, Sullivan created a series of dances, such as Daedalus and Dance in the Snow on the basis of automatist principles: "I let the movements come.... I let rhythms flow." (4) To Febvre these are "performance art avant la lettre," and they "foretell the postmodern dance of the 1960s and 1970s."

Sullivan's career slowed down in the late 1950s, when she was occupied with raising four children. In t959, she turned to abstract sculpture, working with steel and other modern materials in the manner of David Smith, whom she had met at Lake George in 1946. Pieces like The Progress of Cruelty (1964) and Free Falling Red (1966) are not as distant from her choreography as they might seem, for both these sculptures and her dance pieces are based on elementary formal lexicons whose components are repeated with almost compulsive regularity.

In 1970 Sullivan took up conceptual art, though in a version hybridized with performance. Perhaps the most successful example is Abandoned Window, Blocked and Unblocked--Intervention on Blasket Island, Ireland, 1978. Based on the idea of blockage, it's a meditation of sorts on the fashionable notion of the time that painting was dead. (5) In this work, photographed by David Moore, we see the artist methodically barricade an old window with sheets of slate and then, just as systematically, unblock it. With its ritualistic repetition of gesture, this project is strangely moving, but Sullivan reports that "in the long run [the conceptual approach] failed to satisfy me." She was "longing for a daily practice of painting."

One of the highlights of her career, the "Tondo" paintings (1980-83), followed Sullivan's self-critical rejection of conceptual art. The larger examples in this series of circular canvases are characteristic of her bent toward mixed mediums. Tondo 7 (1980) incorporates a little pyramid of reeks stacked in front of it, and Tondo VIII (1980) recapitulates the slight irregularities of its contour and paint handling in the subtle ripples of a knotted rope hanging loosely from the work's top.