Françoise Sullivan

Françoise Sullivan, CM CQ (born June 10, 1925 in Montreal) is a Canadian painter, sculptor, dancer and choreographer.

Biography

Sullivan studied from 1940 to 1944 at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. She took courses in visual arts. Her early paintings were influenced by Fauvism and Cubism. She came into contact with the Québecois painter Paul-Émile Borduas and members of the group Les Automatistes. Automatistes works were selected in 1943 by the art historian Maurice Gagnon to be shown at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal.

From 1945 to 1946, Sullivan studied modern dance in New York with Franziska Boas, the daughter of anthropologist Franz Boas. She also studied briefly with Martha Graham and Louis Horst. The series of photographs she made in February 1948 with the Québecois photographer Maurice Perron, called Danse dans la neige (Dance in the Snow), are arguably the most famous dance photographs in Canadian history. [1] In 1948, she published the essay La danse et l'espoir (Dance and Hope), which is added to the Refus Global manifesto, to which she was one the of signatories (the manifesto, one of the first thoroughgoing art manifestos in Canadian history, is called Total Refusal in English).[2] Her performance with her dance partner Jeanne Renaud in 1948 at the Ross house is considered to be the founding event of modern dance in Quebec.

In 1949, Sullivan married the painter Paterson Ewen. Between 1952 and 1956, she worked as a dancer and choreographer for CBC television. In the late 1950s, she turned to sculpture under the guidance of Armand Vaillancourt and learned welding at Lachine Technical School. In 1960, she took a three-month course in sculpture with Louis Archambault at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. In the late 1960s, Sullivan and Ewen experimented with the Plexiglas. In 1976, they collaborated with the sculptor David Moore.

Montagnes (1997)

During the 1980s, Sullivan turned to painting and produced between 1982-1994 several cycles of paintings, which are regarded as the culmination of her work in this area. In 1997, she realized Montagnes (Mountains), a granite wall located in the main lobby of President Kennedy Pavilion of Université du Québec à Montréal. In 2000, the university bestowed upon her an honorary doctorate.

Since 1997, Sullivan has taught painting at Concordia University.[3] In 2001, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal showed a retrospective of her works in 2001.[4]

Honours

References

  1. ↑ thecanadianencyclopedia.com
  2. ↑ Smart, Patricia. -- Les femmes du Refus global. -- Montréal : Boréal, 1998. -- 334 p. OCLC 38886108
  3. ↑ ccca.concordia.ca
  4. ↑ collectionscanada.gc.ca