Fernand Leduc

In 1946^[1], Leduc moved to Paris with his wife, the poet Thérèse Renaud, and began absorbing European abstraction. He formed a close friendship with Jean Bazaine, whose abstracted landscapes of light and colour fed directly into Leduc's work of the early 1950s. Back in Montreal in 1953, he was already moving away from the looser automatist gesture: by 1955 he had adopted hard-edge abstraction, building compositions from flat, precisely delineated colour fields. That same period saw him found and lead the Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montreal, a sign of how seriously he took the institutional work of getting abstraction taken seriously in Quebec.

Leduc returned to France in 1959^[1], living there until 1970. A retrospective organised jointly by the Centre culturel canadien in Paris and the National Gallery of Canada in 1970 brought together sixteen paintings made in that period, revealing how thoroughly his biomorphic experiments had transformed the earlier geometric strictness into something warmer and stranger.

He was one of the original signatories of the Refus Global manifesto in 1948^[1], a document that split from Catholic conservatism and announced Quebec's cultural modernity. Decades later, honours arrived with the consistency of a long career properly recognised: the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (1977), the Louis-Philippe Hébert Prize (1979), and the Paul-Émile Borduas Prize (1988). Leduc died in Montreal on 28 January 2014^[1].