Three months after his arrival in Paris, Paul-Émile Borduas met the gallery owner Gilbert Blair Laing of Toronto. One day in January 1956, Laing knocked on the door of the painter’s studio on rue Rousselet and, against all odds during this first meeting, he acquired six paintings. Immediately seduced by the remarkable quality of Borduas’s non-figurative works, which he had discovered the previous year while visiting a few galleries in New York, Laing was satisfied with the particularly advantageous terms of sale offered to him that day by the artist.

These recent canvases, still wet, were so fragile that a month was necessary to ensure their safe transport to Canada. From that time until the painter’s death in February 1960, the agreement between the two men was to their great benefit, and Laing remained loyal to the painter in exile, making major purchases in his studio, thus helping to ensure the financial stability necessary for Borduas’s work.

“I believe that we bought more of his paintings during the last three or four years of his life than all other buyers combined,” Laing would say in his Memoirs.[1] Although he preferred the more lyrical abstract paintings executed by the artist in New York, Laing did not hesitate to also acquire a large body of black-and-white works, which were more demanding of the viewer. In this regard, he later confided: “By late 1959, his earlier works were still selling better, the later ones, more and more severe in form and less and less colourful, remained in advance of buyers’ tastes.”[2] Sans titre belongs to that series of more “severe” works that would earn Borduas great notoriety, only posthumously. Probably purchased by Laing in April 1959, Sans titre was acquired the following year by a Toronto collector.[3]

When he created this painting, Borduas, who aspired to create a “cosmic” space, had already been pursuing for two years the “simplifying leap” that had led him to eliminate surface accidents for an “objective” painting; this new organization of the pictorial layer, which thus makes background and surface coincide, is based on a different way of apprehending the idea of limitless depth. On December 24, 1957, Borduas warned his friend Claude Gauvreau that his visual perception of the world had been radically transformed: “What will be the possibilities of this painting ‘in space’? A troubling question.” He clarified his thoughts to the Montreal poet, who remained attached to the Automatist gestures, saying that he was looking for “values dynamic enough to become impersonal on a scale that corresponds to our perception of the cosmos.”[4]

The construction of Sans titre is similar to several other paintings from the same period. Playing with the weight of their mass and their energetic power, arranged on a vertical axis, anthracite-coloured spots pierce the white surface; but unlike the black masses with sharp edges and strongly partitioned contours that characterize his earlier paintings, the edges of some of the spots here are starting to fray. To the extreme simplicity that had characterized several of his recent paintings, to the reversibility of the black-and-white planes, the painter also added the unusual presence on the periphery of light touches of colour that magnificently modulate the composition.

On February 18, 1959, Borduas reported this decisive transformation to his friend the musician Philip Corner: “A new phase is beginning in my painting, in which colour claims its rights.”[5] Sans titre marks this important change in its own way and foreshadows the large-format monochrome canvases that Borduas painted towards the end of 1959, following his meeting with the Parisian artist Yves Klein.

We thank Gilles Lapointe, associate professor in the Department of Art History at the Université du Québec à Montréal and author of several books on Paul-Émile Borduas and the Automatist movement, for contributing the above essay, translated from the French.

1. Gilbert Blair Laing, Memoirs of an Art Dealer (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979), 213.

2. Ibid.

3. The dimensions of the painting (73 x 60 cm) correspond to Figure 20 F, the system then used by Borduas. See the notice of shipping from Borduas to G. Blair Laing on April 21, 1959, in André-G. Bourassa and Gilles Lapointe, eds., Écrits II, vol. 2, 1954–1960 (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1997), 1063.

4. “Letter from Paul-Émile Borduas to Claude Gauvreau of 24 December 19[57],” in ibid., 955.

5. “Letter from Paul-Émile Borduas to Philip Corner of 18 February 1959,” in ibid., 1050.

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