Source: WTL© photograph of image Gauvreau (1982) in Pierre Gauvreau; Passeur de modernité. Québec: Musée de la civilization, 2014, p. 24.
Image: 1941 portrait of Françoise Sullivan (b. 1925) by Pierre Gauvreau. Oil on cardboard.
Comments: At the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal he met his childhood sweetheart, Françoise (see image), and they became intimate friends. She is a sculptor, dancer, and painter, and she remains one of Canada's foremost twentieth-century artists. From 1940, Gauvreau and she diverted from a tradition-bound approach to the arts and began independently exploring modernism, which, more or less, in French Canada developed three decades after the 1907 art explosion of Cubisn with Picasso, Georges Braque, Matisse, and like-minded artists at the lead. In this portrait, one sees a clearly figurative painting but with expressionist and some abstract elements (e.g., the yellow, orange, and blue panels in the background). By 1942 she had gone on her own way, studying in New York and developing her own talents. As a co-signer of the 1948 Refus global, she has said that it was less a political document than a "cri du coeur dans un monde écorché, un cri pour la vie et pour l'art" [A cry of the heart in a flayed world, a cry from the heart for life and art] (op. cit. p. 26).
Humanities Questions: What artistic elements in this painting give you a feeling of what the painter is telling the viewer about Françoise Sullivan's persona and character?