1
Q
Modernism
A
is the loose term given to the succession of styles and movements in art and architecture which dominated Western culture from 19th Century up until the 1960’s. Movements associated with Modern art include Impressionism, Cubism, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Futurism, Pop Art and Op Art.
2
Q
Modernism
A
- appears in art literature music etc.
- was a masculine aesthetic - favoured detached, hard , abstract work
- modernism was inhospitable to women
- modernism is subjective intuitive, rebellious
- can give any interpretation
- began in the latter part of the 19th century
- a movement or style in the arts.
3
Q
Modernism
A
- Another important factor in the development of Canadian pictorial modernity was the fact that artists no longer directed or dictated the audiences response to the image by using obvious emotional or anecdotal motifs.
- The audience’s reaction to the image was tied to the painter’s specific visual strategies colour, composition, space to grab the viewers attention and to supplant a literal meaning of the image
- these considerations are primary concerns of what has been loosely defined as modernism.
4
Q
artists that belong to modernism
A
- Canadian group of painters
- Prudence Heward
- Paraskeva Clark
- Yvonne McKague
- John Lyman
- CAS
5
Q
THE 1920S IN CANADA
A
- Female suffrage
- prohibition laws bans the sale of alcohol & consuming in public places
- mother’s allowance, minimum wage legislation
- low wages, repressive working conditions, high cost of living
- class conflict following the war
- 1929 stock market crashes - beginning the great depression
6
Q
1930s
A
- 1929 NY stock market crashed world was in depression
- Canada many people lost their jobs/farmers faced bankrupcy
- nothing to back you up except welfare - long process to get welfare
- Canada relied on export of products - oil
- no market for Canadian products.
7
Q
1920s 1930s & Group of 7
A
- work by group of 7 heavily criticized
- lawren harris evolved into a modernist painter
- decided to expand their exhibition beyond the group invited other painters
- Canadian Group of Painters
8
Q
members that were exhibiting with Group of 7 & later joined Canadian Group of Painters
A
- Emily Carr, Prudence Heward, H. Habel May, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Kathleen Munn, Yvonne McKague, Bess Housser, Doris Mills, along with L.L. Fitzgerald, George Pepper, Thoreau Macdonald, and Bertram Brooker.
9
Q
The Canadian Group of Painters
A
- official name given to 28 artists across Canada who came together as a group in 1933.
- English speaking artists
- focus of the group was Toronto
- Lawren Harris was the first president
10
Q
The Canadian Group of Painters2
A
- two objectives: should be closer co-operation & communication between between Canadian artists and to cultivate distinctly Canadian art.
- membership came from the whole of Canada
- more modern ideas & techniques are encouraged
- landscape is the first subject matter of the group
11
Q
Isabelle McLaughlin 1937
A
- Born in 1903 Oshawa
- Father was a prominent art collector
- studied at OCA trained by Lismer
- studied in Paris & Italy
- early paintings very decorative.
12
Q
artists that modernist representational painting
A
- James Wilson Morrice
- David Milne
- Carl Shaefer
- LeMoine Fitzgerald.
13
Q
Inhabited Landscape
A
- From the late 1920s onward there was a renewed desire by Canadian modernists to emphasize the landscape as a site of human habitation and cultivation.
- In one type of inhabited landscape a large single structure or a cluster od buildings is contained within its own spatial plane.
- The Buildings are usually frontally positioned placed toward the upper range of the painting and often at a distince distance.
examples next slide.
14
Q
A
LEMOINE FITZGERALD (1890-1956), SUMMER AFTERNOON, 1921
15
Q
A
Farmer’s Daughter, c. 1938 Prudence Heward
16
Q
Prudence Heward 1896 - 1947
A
- another member of the group
- studied with Brymner
- studed in Paris
- friend of Isabelle M.
- makes her name as a portrait painter
17
Q
Inhibited Landscape 2
A
- the theme of the inhabited landscape takes on another identity when architectural structures become the dominant design.
- an emotive sense of the largeness of domestic buildings is often accomplished by positioning the structure against a background of an expansive sky and a comparatively limited foreground.
- this design was frequently used by Carl Shaefer
- the architecture frames nature, thereby suggesting that its unseen inhabitants have disrupted the natural environment and that economic and social needs take priority.
18
Q
A
Farm House by the Railway, Hanover
1939
- making a statement about how important farming and and is
- farming area settled in 19th century
- wheat field
19
Q
Carl Shaefer 1903 - 1995
A
- enrolled in OCA
- instructed by Macdonald & Lismer
- knew Harris & Jackson
- painted in the style of group of 7
- member of the Canadian painters group
20
Q
Ann Savage
A
- Montreal artist
- discovered by Barbeau
- landscape painting
21
Q
A
ANNE SAVAGE, THE PLOUGH, C. 1932
- stylistically influenced from the group of 7
- made the plow the focus of the painting the landscape is a backdrop.
22
Q
Modernism & The Landscape
A
- Landscape is the only theme in representational art in which the picture can never be as large as the subject.
- Canadian modernist landscape images continued to be framed within a horizontal or more often a square format.
- As modernism developed across the country, landscape pictures became increasingly a matter of more freely arranged groupings of simplified elements and corresponded more closely to the way we physically encounter the world.
23
Q
Landscape
A
- modern perspectives allowed nature to become a metaphor for aesthetic experimentation
- modernism defined the landscape as a neutral place and not the intstrument for a national narrative.
- modernist motifs of nature could be found equally in a wilderness or a pastoral site farmland or rural village
- The realism of modernist landscapes lies in its accomodation of natures specificity but the painter is free to deny or manipulate topographical truths.
24
Q
A
LEMOINE FITZGERALD, DOC SNYDER’S HOUSE, 1931
25
David Milne
- strongly contributed to the new visual vocabularies and democratization of subject matter that was essential to Canadian modernist painting.
- worked in New York and in rural Ontario
- IN milne's oils, watercolours and prints he blurs the distinction between painting and drawing, object and setting;
- illustrated typical modernist definitions of landscape painting.
26
DAVID B. MILNE, OLLIE MATSON’S HOUSE IS JUST A SQUARE RED CLOUD, 1931 (FIGURE 7.3)
- his work regardless of subject matter emphasizes the autonomy of his elegant simple forms with their delicate colour and gentle light balanced interweaving of solids and voids as well as intimate stylization and paterning.
27
DAVID MILNE, CARNIVAL DRESS, DOMINION SQUARE, MONTREAL, 1924
28
James Wilson Morrice 1865 - 1924
- the first canadian paradigm of a fully modernist approach to both form and content was James.
- his paintings in national exhibitions stimulated the development of Canadian visual modernity.
- his palpable sensitvity to the harmonies among carefully nuanced shapes spaces and tonalities reflected an international sensibility that would be one of the new resources for Canadian pictorial modernism.
29
James Wilson Morrice The Old Holton House Montreal, 1908 - 9
30
People in Places
- images of everyday people in ordinary urban contexts came into prominence in the 1930s and continued the following decades.
- The human subject's anonymity is often crucial to the meaning of these images
- paintings by André Biéler, of quebec country life, Jack Bush's mid 1940s viewws of rural ontario cast a similar glance at the small dramas of ordinary life in a world less affected by change.
- the modern urban condition with political undercurrents shown through depiction of people as character types seen in Paraskeva Clarks work.
31
ANDRE BIELER (1896-1989), PROCESSION AT SAINTE-FAMILLE (1929) (FIGURE 6.4)
32
PARASKEVA CLARK PETROUSHKA, 1937 (FIGURE 6.7)
“IT IS TIME TO COME DOWN FROM YOUR IVORY TOWER, TO COME OUT FROM BEHIND YOUR PRE-CAMBRIAN SHIELD AND DIRTY YOUR GOWN IN THE MUD AND SWEAT OF CONFLICT.”
33
People in Places 2
- another subject that evoked the everyday life of Canadians was people at work, often at industrial sites in peacetime or war such as munition workers.
- usually men the workers often havr large muscular bodies and almost posed stances which signfy the demands of their jobs.
- evidenced in paintings of miners
- such pictures of physical labour sometimes adopt compositional strategies that relate to traditions of mural painting: an art form that had its own resurgence from the 1920s through 1950.
34
LAWREN HARRIS, MINERS’ HOUSES, GLACE BAY, C.1925
- abstract painting
- houses look like tombstones
- working conditions horrible for miners/death rate high
- looks like a cemetery
35
Figure Painting
- another subject used by the Canadian painters group
- figure painting also reflected another modernist development within the broad genre of portraiture: the painter and the painted assumed equal importance
- modernist portriature priviledged the generalized treatment of the entire body and its natural poise and carriage.
- the content of modernist portraits had changed from being a picture *of* someone to being a metaphor *for* someone.
36
Figure painting 2
- the single figure can be presented in half-length or full length image and usually has no greater action than the subject sitting.
- although the pose suggests absolute stillness, there are sufficient shifts in the arrangement of the parts of the body and the fall of the clothes to suggest the potential moments in time. (Elizabeth Cann)
- subtle gestures such as a slight turning of the head, a glance of the eyes or an insignificant lowering of a shoulder give the sitter individual character as does their cassual loosely worn clothing. (Emily Coonan)
37
Elizabeth Cann, The Soldier's Wife 1941
38
Emily Coonan Italian Girl c.1921
- no emotional attachement with figure & viewer
- not emotionally involved
emphasizes the process of composition style, elements/ forms
- the figure is for coonan the way to explore the formal qualities not interested in figure
39
Emily Coonan 1885 - 1971
- studied with William Brymner
- lived in Paris
- interested in work by Morrice
40
41
Figure Painting 3
- In many modernist portraits the subject is placed against a simplified wall to suggest an unspecified but vaguely familiar interior setting;
- in a number of images the figure is placed bfore a segment of an emblematic Canadian landscape.
- this was common theme in paintings by Prudence Heward.
- for some modernist painters the nude became a symbol of the artists freedom to determine subject matter.
- the naked body carries culturally imposed sexual meanings that would be disguised or thwarted by clothing.
42
Prudence Heward Girl Under a Tree 1931
43
The Self Portrait
- the figure as a subject for modernist innovation is also seen in self portraits of the period
- the visual strategies are the same as those found in modernist figure painting but self portriature maintained its own traditions
- the frequent use of a direct gaze focused on the viewer may betray the conventional process of self portriature : the artist looking in the mirror while constructing the picture.
44
Self Portrait 2
- another motif within the self-portrait is the image of the painter as a professional artist.
- it can be indicated by the presence of a brush an easel or other objects that reference the tools of trade.
- in Paraskeva Clark's myself it is her large hands that signal her profession
- the self portrait has a related but less commen theme: the portriat of another artist such as *Young Canadian* Charles Comfort's famous image of Carl Shaefer.
- related to this are those few examples of portraits of people involved in the art milieu indicating the importance of friendship as a source of subject matter.
45
PARESKEVA CLARK, (1898-1986), MYSELF, 1933
46
Charles Confort, Young Canadian 1932 Hart House
## Footnote
-confort sets him in to the landscape shaefer painted
47
Charles Confort
- another figure painter
- member of Canadian group of painters
- born in scotland
- saw 1st group of 7 exhibition in 1920 inspired him to become a painter
- meets Johnson in Winnipeg gets inspiration from him
- studied with art students league in NY
- specializes in portraits
48
Still Life
- the modern still life continues the traditional presentation of ordinary things in careful arrangement and in repose - the enduring definition of the genre.
- the artist has complete control over the choice and the arrangement of the objects in the image, while the composition depends entirely on the will of the painter and is not dictated by either the rules or whims of nature.
- the image derives its meaning from being an illusion, where the naturalness of the objects ia achived through their artificiality.
- the image maintains its modernist meaning through emphasis on the sensation of neutral inanimate things in their own right and on the dignity of the common place.
49
Still Life 2
- the most familair still - life motif is the presentation of objects on a table or an implied tabletop created by the surface of the support .
- the immediacy of this frontal composition and the close focusing on the objects create a circumscribed private world that gives no hint of its wider context.
- this is seen in LL Fitzgerald still lifes,
50
LEMOINE FITZGERALD, UNTITLED (STILL LIFE: TWO APPLES), C. 1940
(FIGURE 7.10)
- Fitzgerald gets into painting still life
- not alive/still life
- you can manipulate your subject, arrange them anyway you want, thus not real its an illusion
- cheap for artists
51
Lemoine Fitzgerald (1890-1956
- studied painting
- worked as commercial designer & interior decroator
- work characterized by very fine details
- early works described as impressionistic
- never went to France but Impressionist style
- studied images of impressionist technique
52
CCF Co-operative Commonwealth Federation political party
- stated capitalism has failed
- advocated change within the parliamentary system
- The communist party of Canada was shifting its focus away from class struggle
- alarmed by the rise of fascism 1935 world congess of the communist international declared communists should join social democrats and other former enemies in united front.
53
CCF
- The resulting Canadian League Against War and Fascism sponsored the exhibition of paintings by Fritz Brandtner In Montreal 1936.
- Brandtner was an active CCF member an the show was arranged by Norman Bethune new member of the communist party.
- Brandtners show spoke out against the threatened return of the horrors of the WWI
54
Fritz Brandtner
- came to winnipeg in 1928
- met fitzgerald
- politically active in 1930
- 1936 exhibition of his paintings in montreal
- Canadian league agaisnt war & faschism exhibition
- depicted the horrors of WWI
- active CCF member
55
FRITZ BRANDTNER, WAR, 1940
56
New Frontier
- began publishing in toronto in april 1936 as a united front magazine.
- it was intended to rally the middle class intellectuals and artists to the cause of international working class against war and fascism
- its first issues had something like an art column and reproduced work of canadian artists Fritz Brandtner, Charles Comfort, Nathan Pettroff etc.
57
New Frontier 2
- new frontier became more urgent as the spanish civil war intensified
- the art column was replaced by reproductions of art reflecting the conflict in spain.
- December 1936 when Madrid was under attack the New Frontier published a special issue on the war.
58
59
Contemporary Arts Society
- The Contemporary Arts Society of Montreal an exhibiting association found by John Lyman.
- Montreal's modernist painters and their supporters both anglophone and francophone banded together.
- took the lead in Canada in promoting the ideas of European modernism exemplified by paintings of the School of Paris and the Bloomsbury group in England.
60
CAS 2
- English speaking artists dominated the earliest shows in its later years provided an important venue for Paul-Émile Borduas and the Automatistes.
- The CAS's mecca for both anglophone and francophone artists was the modern and creative France.
- the ideal was *art vivant* or living art based on the modern school of Paris.
- it was open to all professional artists who were neither assocciated with nor partial to any academy
61
John Lyman
- founder of the CAS
- Montreal painter and critic
- his emphasis on the importance of pictorial achievement set the tone for modernist art in Canada from the late 1920s to the 1950s.
62
63
YVONNE McKAGUE (1898-1996), COBALT, 1928 (FIGURE 6.3)
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