Black for White and Dark for Light

The Black Star was awarded a Guggenheim International Award in 1960, shortly after the death of its artist, Quebec Automatiste painter Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–1960). Long considered his masterpiece, the painting displays the synthesis of Borduas’s plastic language of his Parisian period: oppositions between strong contrasts (black and white) and more subtle ones (black and brown), and a calculated distribution of the black and brown spots on the white ground. The black spots never reach the periphery of the canvas but remain contained within the pictorial plane, thus ruling out a reversible reading (black on white or white on black). The suggestion of movement that emerges within the white ground by following the folds created by the palette knife are equally characteristic of Borduas’s work at this time. 

We are thus invited to contemplate a “black star” detaching itself from a white sky—the reverse of the black sky to which we are accustomed. In 1957 Borduas could not have guessed at the existence of what astronomers have been calling “black holes” since the 1960s. He created a poetic image of them avant la lettre, which recalls the words of one of the great poets of Quebec, Saint-Denys Garneau: “We decided to create the night / For a single small difficult star.” 

This Spotlight is excerpted from Paul-Émile Borduas: Life & Work by François-Marc Gagnon.