Biography
In 1938 Leduc started his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. After graduating in 1943, he left the church and shortly after became a member of the Contemporary Arts Society. Leduc played a major role in forming the group known as the Les Automatistes, co-signing the Refus Global manifesto, but not contributing to the illustrated book. He moved to Paris with his wife Thérèse Renaud in 1946 and slowly distanced himself from the group. There he participated in an exhibition, called Automatisme, at the Galerie du Luxembourg that examined the group. By late 1948, he had distanced himself from them and had joined the Plasticiens. In Paris, Leduc developed a friendship with the painter Jean Bazaine, whose art was then in the category of abstracted landscape. This contact was an influence on Leduc's works of the early 1950s.
He returned from Paris in 1953. With Paul-Émile Borduas, the theoretician of the Automatist group, he was the one who maintained the closest ties with the French surrealists. Leduc moved to a type of hard-edge abstraction in 1955. He founded the Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montréal (Association des artistes non-figuratifs de Montréal) in 1956. He experimented at that time with various forms of spontaneous and gestural nonfigurative painting, his works gradually becoming more involved with interactions and contrast of colours.
Leduc returned to France in 1959 and stayed there until 1970, when he came back for two years to teach in Montréal. In 1979 he was awarded the Louis-Philippe Hébert Prize and the Paul-Émile Borduas Prize in 1988.
Leduc currently lives in Paris and Italy.
Read more about this topic: Fernand Leduc
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)