Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1948, a startling document was published in Montreal. Refus global (“Total Rejection”) was an angry, poetic declaration of aesthetic independence, an assertion of passionate belief in modernism and even more in intellectual freedom. Most of the sixteen signers were painters, but they also included a poet, a dancer, and a medical student, all now celebrated names in the annals of Canadian culture. Most were under thirty, but the author of the manifesto’s most inflammatory essay, Paul-Emile Borduas, was about twenty years older, a profoundly serious and accomplished painter, trained as an academic church decorator, whose unequivocally modernist works derived from sources as diverse as Matisse and Rouault.

The signers of Refus global had come together informally in the early 1940s when many of them were students at the Ecole du Meuble, a school for cabinetmakers and craftsmen where young Francophone Montrealers with artistic aspirations were sent by their despairing parents to learn something practical. Borduas taught drawing and the history of art there, and was known as an open-minded supporter of young artists. He followed their progress, invited them to his Montreal home and his studio, and to his summer place.

The Borduas circle included students from the Ecole, such as Jean-Paul Riopelle, Marcel Barbeau, and Jean-Paul Mousseau. Pierre Gauvreau, who was enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was invited to join after Borduas saw an exhibition of his student work, and Gauvreau brought his brother Claude, a poet, and fellow