Fernande Saint-Martin

Saint-Martin was born on March 28, 1927, in Montreal, Quebec, to the health medical officer Théo Saint-Martin and Emelda Montbriand. She was the granddaughter of the socialist and l’Université ouvrière founder Albert Saint-Martin. She earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in medieval studies in 1947, and philosophy in 1948 from the Université de Montréal. Saint-Martin went on to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree in French Studies in 1951 and a Master of Arts degree in French literature in 1952 from the McGill University. In 1973, she returned to education, graduating from McGill with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in literature with her dissertation on Samuel Beckett's fictional world.[1]

Following the completion of her education, Saint-Martin began working in student and union journalism.[2] She began working for La Presse in 1954, where she systemically promoted working women in the publication,[3] and talked about the least active women and conducted interviews as she expanded from two to six journalists.[2][4] From the 1950s to the 1960s, Saint-Martin got involved in feminist activism, promoting contraception and social rights relating to advancing female equality in society, and defending women intellectuals.[1] She and the painter Guido Molinari formed the L’Actuelle art gallery in 1953 and ran it until its closure two years later.[5][6] In 1958, Saint-Martin published the essay La littérature et le non-verbal: essai sur la langue,[1][7] and helped to establish the debate and ideas publication Situations that same year.[1]

Two years later in October 1960, Saint-Martin was appointed editor-in-chief of Châtelaine magazine,[3] the first woman to hold the position at the publication.[6] At the publication, she published art-related pieces and poetry, some deemed unconventional for women's magazines in that era. In 1966, Saint-Martin was one of sixteen signatories to the nondenominational feminist organization Fédération des femmes du Québec.[1] She subsequently authored the essays La femme et la société cléricale and La femme et la société cléricale in 1967 and 1968, respectively.[1][7] Saint-Martin left Châtelaine in 1972 and was appointed director of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal late that year.[3][4][8] She was given a mandate to restructure the museum so its influence could be extended and be opened to all forms of contemporary art.[7] Saint-Martin oversaw more than double the number of visitations to the museum and increased her budget to five times its original amount.[9]

Saint-Martin became a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec in 1974.[1][6] Two years later, she wrote Samuel Beckett et l’univers de la fiction about Beckett's prose fiction.[10] In 1977, Saint-Martin stepped down as director of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and began working as a professor and researcher in the Department of Art and History of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 1979 following a brief period at Université Laval.[6] In 1980, she published the essay Les fondements topologiques de la peinture. Essai sur les modes de représentation de l’espace à l’origine de l’art enfantin et de l’art abstrait and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1982. Saint-Martin authored the book, La fiction du réel : poèmes 1953–1975, in 1985.[1] Two years later, she published the book Sémiologie du langage visuel.[3][4]

On November 17, 1988, Saint-Martin was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada by the Governor General of Canada,[11] and earned the André Laurendeau Award from the Association francophone pour le savoir that same year.[1][4][7] She won the Molson Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences and with it a $50,000 cheque from the Canada Council for her work in semiology in 1989.[5][6][9] Between 1990 and 1994, Saint-Martin was the International Association for Visual Semiotics' president.[1] During this period, she published La théorie de la Gestalt et l’art visuel. Essai sur les fondements de la sémiotique visuelle in 1990.[12] In September 1996, Saint-Martin retired from the UQAM to focus primarily on writing.[6]

She wrote Marouflée la langue, dessins et poèmes, Le sens du langage visuel. Essai de sémantique visuelle psychanalytique and L’immersion dans l’art. Comment donner sens aux œuvres de 7 artistes : le Maître de Flémalla, O. Leduc, Magritte, Mondrian, Lichtenstein, Rothko, Molinari over the following twelve years. Saint-Martin was also a contributor to various magazines such as Art International, artscanada, Les Herbes rouges, Liberté, RACAR and Vie des arts.[1] One of her final public acts was to sign a public letter to Philippe Couillard, the Premier of Quebec in May 2018, requesting his assistance to relieve the Académie des lettres du Québec of its financial difficulties.[5]

She married the painter Guido Molinari in 1958.[1] They had two children, a daughter and son. Saint-Martin died from various health problems relating to old age at L'hôpital de Ste-Agathe, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, on December 11, 2019.[4][13] A tribute to her was organised by the L’Académie des lettres du Québec and the Fondation Guido Molinari on February 15, 2020.[3]

Christine Palmiéri described Saint-Martin as "fascinating as a teacher" and "was not just giving material, she was thinking at the same time."[5] Lev Manovich of The American Journal of Semiotics wrote that the author "follows the model of formal grammar, where language is described as a set of elements combined according to syntactic rules to form statements."[12]

• Fernande Saint-Martin at IMDb