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

Sullivan's paintings from the "Cretan Cycle" (1983-86), inspired by long sojourns in Greece, are less convincing. She was reading Jung at the time, and aimed to achieve a universally meaningful symbolism, although she eschewed any direct reference to specific myths or archetypes. Images are pieced together, as if collaged, without regard for perspective. But her invented hybrid figures, hovering between human and animal form, and their occasional juxtaposition with modern inventions, such as the submarine, seem forced.

In recent years, Sullivan observes, figuration has been "disappearing bit by bit" from the work, dissolved in a flurry of reiterative touches. For her, a simplified vocabulary is the only acceptable esthetic: "I provided myself with ... limits, and stuck to them." Now, Dery observes in her book, Sullivan is painting "in a relatively restricted register" and the work is based on a "practice of disencumberment." The results include a series of splendid pastels and two large monochrome quadriptychs: Blues nos. 6, 5, 3, 4 and Reds nos. 3, 5, 6, 2 (both 1997). In these epic works we can see how the Sullivan esthetic unifies an entire career, no matter how disparate the various periods and phases. This, Febvre suggests, is an art based on accumulative gesture, done almost in "trance or rapture," which the artist intends to be "radical and yet disciplined."

In 2002, Sullivan experienced a number of distressing personal losses: her brother John, the painter Paterson Ewen (her former husband), and fellow Automatist artists Jean-Paul Riopelle and Marcelle Ferron all died. Under the pressure of these events, her art grew, paradoxically, both more luminous and darker; black came into the paintings, and movement became much more stately. The resultant "Homage" series made a fitting climax to the exhibition.

Selecting from an oeuvre as varied as Sullivan's and installing the work as a cohesive whole is a challenge that the museum met with varying degrees of success. The video and film presentations of reconstructed Sullivan dances from the 1940s, performed by such sensitive interpreters as Louise Bedard, Ginette Boutin and Ginette Laurin, effectively evoked the early history of modern dance in Quebec. The open spaces around the grand staircase at the core of the exhibition afforded the large-scale "Homage" paintings the breathing space they require. But the dark, intensely colored walls were another matter. Sullivan's Tondos, in particular, were significantly diminished by them, especially Tondo 7 (1980), which has a cutout area that had to be backed up by raw canvas to block off the deep red of the wall. And while the museum rightly emphasized the recent work, some of Sullivan's most outstanding large pastels remained inexplicably in the studio. Nonetheless, this was a rich and impressive show by one of the pioneers of modern art in Canada.

(1.) Presentation by the artist to the faculty fine arts, York University, Toronto, Oct. 29, 1997.

(2.) Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the artist are taken from her statement "My Painting Is ... My Painting Is" in the exhibition catalogue Francoise Sullivan, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2003, pp. 41-43.