Léon Bellefleur - Abstractionism and Surrealism

 

 Léon Bellefleur (1910 - 2007) was a French-Canadian painter and print-maker.
Léon Bellefleur was born in Montréal, Quebec, in 1910, and by the age of ten was drawing and painting.He earned a teaching diploma at Jacques Cartier teachers college in Montreal, graduating in 1929 and had a career in teaching for the next 25 years. He was mainly self-taught as an artist, but took evening classes from around 1929 until 1936 at the École des Beaux-Arts where he expressed his youthful admiration for the work of Rembrandt. In 1938, Bellefleur met Alfred Pellan and through a friend, the Montreal art world. In 1943, he joined the Contemporary Arts Society. He was also a member of the Canadian Group of Painters, the Canadian Society of Graphic Art and The Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montreal (1960).
He participated in the activities of the Montreal surrealists and in Montréal in 1945, he participated in the Exquisite corpse (Cadavre exquis) experiments with Albert Dumouchel, Jean Benôit, Jean Léonard, Mimi Parent and Pellan. In 1948, he signed the manifesto Prisme d'yeux, which defended diverse approaches to art-making.
After the group dissolved, he remained friendly with the members of the Prisme d'yeux, but followed his own aesthetic, inspired by Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and children`s art.Although he had been influenced in his early work by Pellan, following automatism and surrealism, he began to record the unconscious, creating coded atmospheres, states of mind and crystalline structures.[6] He once said:"The fundamental discoveries for me were poetry, surrealism and esoterism - and, in art, a certain automatism translating the life of dreams and the unconscious, the world of chance and mystery."Wikipedia