Discours (Speech), 1978, mixed media, 13 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches, signed and dated lower right, titled lower left. Léon Bellefleur was born in Montreal. By the tender age of 10, he was drawing and painting. From 1929 to 1936, he took evening classes at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. In 1938, he met Alfred Pellan...and the Montreal art world. Although he had been influenced by his friend Pellan, he began to record the unconscious, creating coded atmospheres, states of mind and crystalline structures, as seen here in this work. 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". In 1945, he travelled to Paris to study engraving...and continued to go there regularly. In 1960, along with Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean Paul Riopelle, Harold Town, and Edmund Alleyn, he represented Canada at the Guggenheim International. Through his career, Bellefleur won numerous awards and grants, and he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1989.