Biography

Marcel Barbeau was born in Montreal on February 18, 1925. Between 1942 and 1947, he studied painting and sculpture with Paul-Émile Borduas at the Ecole du Meuble in Montreal, where he was a student in furniture design. During this time, and until 1953, he regularly visited his master’s studio, where he met other young artists and intellectuals, all members of the Automatistes. As a member of this major Canadian contemporary art movement, he participated in all exhibitions featuring the group and signed its manifesto, “Total refusal.” Some art historians consider him to be the most innovative artist of the movement. He was also a junior member of the Montreal Society of Contemporary Art, with which he exhibited from 1945 to 1948.

From 1958 to 1974 and from 1991 to 1996, he lived and worked in the United States and Europe. During visits to New York (1951) and San Francisco (1957), he met artists from the Abstract Expressionists movement and the Pacific School. In Paris, he reunited with Fernand Leduc from the Automatists’ group and associated with minimalist and kinetic artists from Galerie Iris Clert, where he exhibited. Among these artists, Lucio Fontana wrote an introduction for the catalog of his solo exhibition at Iris Clert gallery. In New York, Barbeau socialized with members of the French kinetic movement, GRAV (Groupe de recherche d’art visuel), and exhibited with the American op art school throughout the United States. After his retrospective show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1969, he spent a year in Southern California, where he undertook photography and sculpture projects. Living in France between 1971 and 1974, he began his major series of monumental sculptures and performed for the first time. Since then, he has divided his time between painting and sculpture. In 1991, he returned to Paris, where he worked for a few months each year until the spring of 1996. In the fall of that year, he settled in Bagnolet, a suburb of Paris, continuing to visit Canada every summer.

His works are housed in numerous private, public, and corporate collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe, including the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the British Museum (London), the Chrysler Art Gallery (Norfolk, Virginia), the Lyon Museum of Fine Arts (Lyon, France), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal), the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (Montreal), the Quebec National Fine Arts Museum (Quebec), the Rose Art Museum (Waltham, N.J.), and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).

Marcel Barbeau passed away on January 2, 2016, in Montreal.