(Re)discovering Albert Dumouchel

Albert Dumouchel is considered to be the father of modern printmaking in Quebec and, through his career as both teacher and artist, he went on to become the most influential printmaker in Canada in the 1950s. Despite this, his prints are not widely known today. The exhibition Revelations is an opportunity for our visitors to discover the extraordinary breadth of etchings, engravings and lithographs – among other techniques – by Dumouchel in the Museum’s collection. The MMFA began acquiring his works in 1955, and a recent donation of prints from a Montreal collection has further strengthened our institution’s holdings, such that it now boasts a representative collection of Dumouchel’s oeuvre spanning his entire 25-year career.

The close to 35 prints in the exhibition will reveal not only the accomplished work of Dumouchel, but his extraordinary path from a self-educated artist to one who was widely appreciated and who spearheaded modern printmaking in Quebec. The astonishing range of imagery comprising his output from the early 1940s to the 1960s is a testament to the artist’s proclivity to respond to his current and continually shifting cultural milieu. Interestingly, his oeuvre thus offers a brief pictorial narrative of history from La Grande Noirceur to the Quiet Revolution.

In 1941, Dumouchel met Suzanne Beaudoin, who was equally but differently influential. A student at the École des Beaux-arts de Montréal, she introduced him to the city’s burgeoning group of avant-garde artists, including Jacques de Tonnancour and Alfred Pellan. Her father founded the École des arts graphiques in 1942, and Dumouchel began teaching there the same year, thus marking the beginning of his highly impactful career as a teacher. Four years later, the couple (married in 1943) established themselves in Montreal. During this postwar period, the artist enthusiastically worked with Arthur Gladu to produce two issues of Les Ateliers d’arts graphiques, a short-lived but significant publication that brought together the works of writers, artists and students with the aim of promoting graphic arts in Quebec. As a signatory of the 1948 Prisme d’yeux manifesto, Dumouchel furthered his alliance with a group of Montreal artists who were espousing a broad conception of avant-garde painting.

The protean nature of Dumouchel’s work is particularly striking in his revisiting of figurative subjects in the 1960s: works depicting folkloric scenes of Quebec society alternate with the sharp focus and edgy images akin to Pop art. The latter aesthetic informed a series of wood engravings that reference popular erotic imagery of the day. These works were created towards the end of the 1960s, when he was spending much of his time in Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu.

His desire to return to the rural environment of his youth is mirrored in his interest in working in the now archaic technique of woodcuts, itself a reactionary response to the mechanization of modern life.¹ Meanwhile Dumouchel’s teaching career was coming to a close, despite its enduring impact: throughout the 1960s, he was responsible for the print workshop at the École des Beaux-arts. He never prescribed specific imagery to his students, focusing instead on transmitting his profound knowledge of technique to his students. Dumouchel’s enthusiasm and generosity as a teacher sparked a new generation of young printmakers in the 1960s and remains an important aspect of his legacy.