Laurence Hyde | |
---|---|
![]() Hyde in 1945 | |
Born | Laurence Evelyn Hyde 6 June 1914 Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England |
Died | 8 August 1987 73) Canada | (aged
Laurence Evelyn Hyde (6 June 1914 – 8 August 1987) was an English-born Canadian film maker, painter, and graphic artist, known for his work with the National Film Board of Canada, stamp designs for the Canadian Postal Service, and the wordless novel Southern Cross (1951).
Hyde was born in the United Kingdom at Kingston upon Thames (near London), but immigrated to Canada with his parents in 1926. Settling in Toronto, Hyde was drawn to the arts by exhibits at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) and especially seeing Lawren Harris' North Shore, Lake Superior. "That was the first one that made a great impression on me and it's then that I became really serious about art." [1] He began attending night classes at Toronto's Central Technical High School where his teachers included Carl Schaefer and Charles Goldhamer. In the early 1930s, Hyde took up wood engraving, and other forms of block engraving, his work often appearing as illustrations or cover art for left-wing publications, such as New Advance and New Frontier. [2] In 1942, Hyde moved to Ottawa, joining the National Film Board of Canada under John Grierson and worked at the NFB until his retirement in 1972. Hyde was married in 1939 to Bettye Marguerite Bambridge, and had two sons, Anthony Hyde (1946– ) and Christopher (1949–2014), both novelists.
Hyde's film-making at the NFB fell into two periods. Beginning in 1945, he directed a number of films in typical NFB documentary style, including Fur Trade (1946, produced by Harry Campbell), Bronco Busters (1946, about the Calgary Stampede) and Art for Everybody (1948, produced by Sydney Newman, part of the Canada Carries On series). During the McCarthyite period, people identified as having left-wing political affiliations were not permitted to hold positions normally given film credits, thereby compelling many film-makers to leave the Board, and forcing Hyde out of film production into the Board's promotion department, where he spent the next seventeen years. He returned to film-making in 1967 with the first of the Tuktu series, which eventually included thirteen documentary films for children based around the life of an Inuit boy and his family. These films were very successful, distributed worldwide, and were recognised at the 21st Venice Biennale. Hyde also made more conventional documentaries, such as Tugboat (1968), Family House (1970, based on an essay by the architect Humphrey Carver) and City Limits (1971, an exploration of the North American city through the eyes of Jane Jacobs.)
Hyde was introduced to the possibilities of postage stamp design by Emanuel Hahn, who designed several Canadian coins and stamps, and whom Hyde met while making the NFB documentary, Third Dimension (1947), a survey of Canadian sculpture. He was also interested in the techniques of steel engraving (still in use for stamps at that time), and wrote about them in Canadian Art. Between 1954 and 1957 he produced eight stamps for the Post Office of Canada: 1954, a 15¢ airmail stamp depicting a gannet in flight; 1955, a 5¢ stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of Alberta and Saskatchewan joining the Canadian Confederation; 1955, a 5¢ stamp honouring the 8th World Scout Jamboree, at Niagara-on-the-Lake, the first held outside Europe; 1957, a series of 5¢ stamps, illustrating Canadian recreational activities—fishing; swimming; hunting; skiing; and in 1957 a 5¢ stamp of the common loon, described by a reviewer as possessing "the rare combination of delicate treatment and rugged clarity that is appropriate to a stamp size picture". [3] [4] [5]
Hyde wrote and illustrated a children's book, Brave Davy Coon, and published (but did not illustrate) two juvenile novels, Under the Pirate Flag and Captain Deadlock. He contributed illustrations and decorations to many books, such as A Pocketful of Canada [6] and early editions of the poetry of Jay Macpherson (O Earth Return, 1954, Toronto), Daryl Hine (Five Poems, 1954, Toronto), and Dorothy Livesay (New Poems, 1954, Toronto). He provided nine major wood engravings for William E. Greening's [7] The Ottawa and many smaller engravings for Canada's First Bank: A History of the Bank of Montreal, by Merril Dennison. [8]
Although Hyde worked in many media—he also produced easel paintings throughout his career—he is best known for his wood engravings. Wood engravings are distinguished from woodcuts by being engraved on blocks composed of end grain pieces of hard, fine-grained woods, such as boxwood or pear later, thus enabling complex images with very fine lines to be produced. [9] Hyde became interested in this technique while at Central Tech, and made his first engravings under the influence of British artists such at Paul Nash and Eric Gill, and the American, Rockwell Kent. In 1934 Hyde produced, Discovery, a series of engravings (at least fifty-one) telling the story of the Viking discovery of America, and in 1937 a portfolio of illustrations for Macbeth (Golden Dog Press, Toronto). His most important work in the media was created between 1948 and 1951, Southern Cross , "A Novel of the South Seas, Told in Wood Engravings". [10] Using 118 wood engravings, Hyde tells a story based around the tests of the hydrogen bomb made by the United States at the Bikini Atoll in 1946. The inspiration of book was clearly political, and the book has been called "a political marker of the Cold War years". It is—as Rockwell Kent says in his introduction the book—the work of "a master of the difficult and infinitely laborious art of wood engraving". [11]
Two complete editions of "Southern Cross" were printed by the artist; one is held by the National Gallery of Canada and the other by the Burnaby Art Gallery. [12] A reprint edition of Southern Cross has been issued by Drawn & Quarterly and the entire novel has also been republished in Graphic Witness, edited by George A. Walker [13] in company with works by Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, and Giacomo Patri, so that the work can be seen in historical context. The novel, with a large selection of illustrations, is carefully considered in a major critical work, Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels, by wordless novel historian David A. Beronä. [14] In a review of Graphic Witness, Lance Eaton states, "Hyde incorporates curve and circular cuts into his work much more extensively, as well as providing layers within his work." [15] Hyde's later work included a portfolio of engravings for Tolstoy's War and Peace in 1986.
Hyde's career was the subject of a major retrospective at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, in 1986, and was accompanied by a monograph, The Wood Engravings of Laurence Hyde, by the curator Patricia Ainslie.
The principal collections of Hyde's work are in the Glenbow Museum, [16] Calgary, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Burnaby Art Gallery, with other important collections in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. His work is also represented in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, [17] The Concordia Art Gallery, Montreal, and the Library of Congress.
Cornelius David Krieghoff was a Dutch-born Canadian-American painter of the 19th century. He is best known for his paintings of Canadian genre scenes involving landscapes and outdoor life, which were as sought after in his own time as they are today. He painted many winter scenes, some in several variants.
David Alexander Colville, LL. D. was a Canadian painter and printmaker.
Lynd Kendall Ward was an American artist and novelist, known for his series of wordless novels using wood engraving, and his illustrations for juvenile and adult books. His wordless novels have influenced the development of the graphic novel. Although strongly associated with his wood engravings, he also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward was a son of Methodist minister, political organizer and radical social activist Harry F. Ward, the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union on its founding in 1920.
Jack Leonard Shadbolt, was a Canadian painter.
Derek Michael Besant is a Canadian artist living in Calgary, Alberta who, since the 1980s, has created prints, watercolours and large-scale art, shown in exhibitions and as public art projects in Canada and abroad. Since the mid-1990s, he has developed working with the new technology available in photographic imaging to create experimental prints and print installations.
Alma Mary Duncan was a Canadian painter, graphic artist, and filmmaker from Paris, Ontario. A prolific artist working in a variety of mediums including charcoal, chalk pastel, ink, watercolour, oil paint, puppetry, and film, Duncan's style evolved drastically over the course of her career to include portraiture, precise representational drawings, machine aesthetic, and abstraction.
Helen Barbara Howard was a Canadian painter, wood-engraver, drafter, bookbinder and designer who produced work consistently throughout her life, from her graduation in 1951 from the Ontario College of Art until her unexpected death in 2002.
Margaret Dorothy Shelton (1915–1984) was a Canadian artist who lived nearly all of her life in Alberta. She worked in a number of mediums but is best known for her block printing.
Rosemary Kilbourn is a Canadian printmaker, illustrator and stained glass artist known for her work in the wood engraving.
The wordless novel is a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using woodcut and other relief printing techniques, the terms woodcut novel or novel in woodcuts are also used. The genre flourished primarily in the 1920s and 1930s and was most popular in Germany.
Southern Cross is the sole wordless novel by Canadian artist Laurence Hyde (1914–1987). Published in 1951, its 118 wood-engraved images narrate the impact of atomic testing on Pacific islanders. Hyde made the book to express his anger at the US military's nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll.
George Alexander Walker is a Canadian artist and writer best known for his wood engravings and wordless novels.
Prelude to a Million Years: A Book of Wood Engravings is a 1933 wordless novel consisting of thirty wood engravings by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985). It was the fourth of Ward's six wordless novels, a genre Ward discovered while studying wood engraving in Europe, and delved into under the influence of the works of Frans Masereel and Otto Nückel. The symbol-rich story tells of a sculptor who, in his quest for ideal beauty, neglects the reality of the struggles of his neighbors in the depths of the Great Depression. The engravings are done in a softer Art Deco style in contrast to the German Expressionism-influenced artwork of Ward's earlier works.
Aganetha Dyck is a Canadian sculptor residing in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Dyck is best known for her work with live honeybees, that build honeycomb on objects that she introduces to honeybee hives. In 2007 Dyck was awarded both Manitoba's Arts Award of Distinction and Canada's Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Renée Van Halm is a Canadian contemporary visual artist born in Haarlemmermeer, the Netherlands (1949) and immigrated to Canada in 1953.
Mary Annora Brown L.L. D. (1899–1987), known as Annora Brown, was a Canadian visual artist whose work encompassed painting and graphic design. She was best known for her depictions of natural landscapes, wildflowers, and First Nations communities in Canada. Much of her work thematically explored Albertan identity, though she remained relatively obscure in discussions of Canadian art.
Ulayu Pingwartok was a Canadian Inuk artist known for drawings of domestic scenes and nature.
David Bairstow (1921-1985) was a Canadian producer and director and one of the most prolific filmmakers at the National Film Board of Canada.
Henri Léopold Masson L.L. D. was a Canadian painter, known for his depictions of scenes in the province of Quebec.
William Walker Alexander, who signed his work W. W. Alexander, was a printmaker and bookplate maker.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)