Complementary contemporaries
The painters who pushed Canadians out of their comfort zone
When a group of abstract painters first exhibited in Toronto, “we got the hell pasted out of us in the press,” Jack Bush recalled.
That was in the early 1950s. He and 10 like-minded abstractionists had just formed Painters Eleven.
Bush is one of about a dozen artists whose work is on show in The Contemporaries, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. The exhibition, comprising work from the permanent collection, focuses on modernism in Toronto from the late 1940s to the 1960s.
All the painters were contemporaries of Michael Snow, whose work is showcased in the AGH’s Early Snow exhibition. Like Snow, some of these artists showed at the Isaacs Gallery, a major commercial gallery in Toronto owned by Avrom Isaacs.
The exhibition has two components: paintings by artists in Isaacs’ stable and works by members of Painters Eleven.
Christiane Pflug (1936-72), an Isaacs Gallery regular, made several portraits of Isaacs, one of which is on display. She captures him up close in an intimate head-and-shoulders pose, looking smart in a red shirt, black tie and jacket.
Pflug’s subjects included still life and landscape. Another Isaacs Gallery artist, Graham Coughtry, had no time for landscape.
“Every damn tree in the country has been painted,” he once said.
Coughtry (1931-99) is well known for his soft-edged, almost ethereal, male and female figures. In “Leaping Figure,” a life-size skinny human takes centre stage. The figure, in profile, assumes a transitory pose, moving rightward, appearing and disappearing. One arm is extended away from the body, the legs bent at the knees and meeting at the ankles.
The space surrounding the figure is divided in two: earth tones below and blues above. Coughtry separates the two with a line that runs a bit higher on the right than on the left, creating a kind of unsettling space.
“The initial impulse is a regard for the figure itself,” he said. “Then a way of painting emerges, and this is the most important outcome.”
Coughtry creates a variety of surface textures by dripping paint, thinning it and building it up. The figure’s right knee, for instance, is loaded with small, thick brush strokes that sit on the surface. Slightly raised spirals add subtle relief work in the blue area.
Bush’s “Black Velvet” is pure abstraction. Bush (1909-77) simplifies his composition by offering five big, bold shapes. Each one is slightly different. Some boast rounded edges, others, straighter ones.
Scarlet shapes approximating trapezoids sit above and below a narrower black area. The red and black are flanked by brown and green shapes. These resemble segments of a circle with the sides of the painting providing the straight edges.
Bush said in 1965 that he aimed to create “pictures that are easy for the eye to contemplate, challenging in their simplicity and difficult to pin down.”
Bush’s composition is simple by comparison with Hortense Gordon’s “Composition.” She breaks her surface into an exuberant profusion of multicoloured squares, rectangles, arcs, parts of circles and ovals that touch and overlap.
Gordon (1881-1961) lived in Hamilton and was one of two women in Painters Eleven. Initially a painter of landscape and still life, she embraced abstraction after a visit to New York City in 1929, becoming one of Canada’s earliest nonrepresentational painters.
Regina Haggo is giving an illustrated talk, Women Driven to Abstraction, at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, on Thursday, March 26, at 7 p.m. It’s a look at some of the female pioneers of abstraction in Europe and Canada. For information and tickets, go to artgalleryofhamilton.com or phone 905-527-6610.
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. rahaggo@gmail.com