Ozias Leduc: An Art of Love and Reverie

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Ozias Leduc is the catalogue for the exhibition presented at the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Spring 1996; at the Musée du Québec,
Summer 1996; and at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Winter 1996/97. The
substantial text includes essays by guest curator Laurier Lacroix,
Franзois-Marc Gagnon, Arlene Gehmacher. The retrospective honors the
first teacher of Paul-Йmile Borduas, and is the very first assembling
of so many of Leduc’s works. Leduc (1864–1955) spans two centuries
of Quebec painting.

Lacroix writes: “The reading that emerges from this exhibition shows
Leduc as paradigmatic of a dichotomy that lies at the heart of cultural
experience in French-speaking Quebec. We find an artist formed by a
society both Catholic and nationalist, who was drawn by art towards a
spiritual and intellectual world of greater breadth. His work is seen to
occupy an ambiguous position between rigour and sensuality, spirituality
and materiality.” Lacroix thus sees in Leduc’s art a message for our
own era.

The volume features more than 250 reproductions of Leduc’s works in
colour and black and white, including some well-known masterpieces held
by the National Gallery, such as Boy with Bread (before 1897) and The
Young Student (1894). Fine-quality reproductions support the claim that
this original artist provides a link between tradition and modernity in
Quebec and Canada.