Canadian painter. He was trained in Montreal as a church decorator and later studied in Paris. In the early 1940s, influenced by Surrealism, he began to produce “automatic” paintings and with Jean-Paul Riopelle founded the radical abstract group known as Les Automatistes (c. 1946–51). His later works are reminiscent of those of Jackson Pollock (Pollock, Jackson), but the only U.S. influence he acknowledged was that of Franz Kline (Kline, Franz). See also automatism.