Dr. Gagnon
François-Marc Gagnon, Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art
A dynamic and inspiring teacher, he taught at the Université de Montréal for thirty-five years where he developed many research programs. Dr. Gagnon is a prolific researcher and has received the Governor General's Award for his 1978 critical biography of Paul-Émile Borduas. Since 1996, he has published more than fifteen important books and catalogues, including the award-winning Chronique du mouvement automatiste québécoise 1941-1954 (1998). He also wrote many essays on artists such as Marcel Barbeau, Jacques Hurtubise, Jean-Paul Riopelle and, more recently, Cornelius Krieghoff for the touring exhibition Krieghoff's Canada, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Dr. Gagnon has long worked in close collaboration with many cultural institutions and associations devoted to the study of Canadian art. He was a member of the acquisition committee of the Musée d'art contemporain and of the National Gallery of Canada. Known for his deep knowledge of Canadian history and art and for his exceptional ability to popularize complex subjects, he presented a series of video conferences titled Introduction à la peinture moderne au Québec at Canal Savoir in 1998. Convinced of the importance of educating the public through various media, Dr. Gagnon provides invaluable support to the Institute in its mission to advance the greater appreciation and understanding of Canadian visual culture of all eras.
Brief history and evolution of the project
The Paul-Émile Borduas Catalogue Raisonné was conceived by Dr. François-Marc Gagnon (1935-2019) to give Borduas’s painted works the same visibility and sustained scientific attention as his writings—especially Refus Global—have received in Canadian cultural history. Led by Gagnon, the team set out to identify all known works—drawings, watercolours, gouaches, photographs, oil paintings, and sculptures—verify metadata, and document publication and exhibition histories. Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the project is a major initiative of the Jarislowsky Institute at Concordia University, now conducted in partnership with archivist René St-Pierre and web developer Brendan Reed.
Briefly summarized, the project began as a set of research files in FileMaker, later migrated in 2012 to a custom web interface built at Concordia. That same year, St-Pierre, creator of the Archiv’Art platform derived from sculptor Armand Vaillancourt’s catalogue raisonné, received a Fellowship at the Institute to explore how to enhance the Borduas database with professor Gagnon. At the time, the catalogue did not connect “works,” “exhibitions,” and “bibliography.” In 2017, as part of a master’s in Art History at UQAM, St-Pierre developed a proof of concept linking these entities and adding a “documents and archives” section. He presented the prototype publicly, alongside François-Marc Gagnon and Gilles Lapointe, during one of the Afternoon at the Institute events, later serving as Gagnon’s research assistant until 2019. Before his death, Gagnon entrusted Lapointe and St-Pierre with continuing the catalogue raisonné project and deepening the study of Borduas’s body of works.
In 2023, Lapointe passed the torch to St-Pierre, who established the Borduas Committee to review inclusion requests to the catalogue and advance research. Its connoisseurship relies on collaboration among professionals such as Paul Maréchal, author of several Warhol catalogues raisonnés, and Richard Gagnier, former head of conservation at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
In 2025, the project enters a new phase: migration to a cloud-based, modular, interoperable database aligned with museum and archival systems. With the research corpus now stable yet evolving, the focus turns to data enrichment and discovery tools—ensuring that Borduas’s oeuvre remains accessible, authoritative, and enduring for future generations.
The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute
The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art was established in 1998 through the generous financial support of Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky. The Institute seeks to advance the greater appreciation and richer understanding of Canadian visual culture of all eras. To accomplish this goal, the Institute:
- Supports research on Canadian art for the professional scholarly community, for pedagogical purposes at all levels of education, and most importantly for the general public.
- Produces scholarly materials in print and electronic formats such as monographs, journals, bibliographies, catalogue raisonnés, films and videos.
- Maintains a broad and ongoing dialogue within the academic and museum communities on the evolving nature of studies in the visual arts in Canada.
- Collaborates on projects and publications with educational and cultural institutions, as well as the private sector.
- Establishes links to national and international art communities through public events such as conferences and lectures.
