Parisian Laundry, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal
Marcelle Ferron remained faithful to automatism throughout her career; she was driven by the aesthetic, the solidarity of the group, and especially the teachings of Paul-Émile Borduas, who promised her at their first meeting that he would show her how to find the “joy” in her painting. Ferron had undergone an artistic crisis in the period preceding her meeting with Borduas in 1946, and his art and personality had a life-changing and enduring effect on the young painter. A signatory of the "Refus Global" in 1948, Ferron was one of seven women to sign the manifesto and one of the youngest to do so, at age twenty-four.
By the mid-1950s, Ferron had achieved significant success in Quebec and Canada. She moved to Paris in 1953 and settled in the suburb of Clamart, exhibiting throughout Europe until 1965. Ferron was granted a silver medal at the São Paulo Biennial in 1962, which marked the most recognition a female artist from Quebec had ever received.
In Paris from 1953-1966, Ferron moved away from the Surrealist patterns central to the Automatistes to develop immediately recognizable paintings such as "Sans titre". Grounded in her expressive facility with paint, Ferron’s strong gestures with the palette knife create thick layers of colours, ranging from deep purples and browns in the centre to red, yellow and aqua surrounded by the white ground.
In 1966, Ferron returned to Quebec and abandoned painting to work in stained glass for several years. A politically active artist, she became involved in various democratic, trade union, and separatist causes. She was drawn to creating public art that would reach everyone. Committed to the democratization of art, Ferron produced several large-scale stained glass works, including in Champs-de-Mars and Vendôme metro stations in Montreal. She was appointed as a professor at Université Laval, and in 1983 she became the first female artist to receive the prestigious Paul-Émile Borduas Prize, inspiring a whole generation of artists working to secure a place for women in the arts.
