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Painters Eleven (also known as Painters 11) was a group of abstract artists active in Canada between 1953 and 1960. [1] [2] They are associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. [3]
Since the 1920s, artists in English Canada had been heavily influenced by the landscape painting of the Group of Seven, and the Canadian Group of Painters. The Canadian public often regarded modernist movements such as Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism as bizarre and subversive. The acquisition of modernist paintings, even Impressionist works, by public galleries was invariably a source of controversy.
In Quebec, Paul-Émile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle spearheaded the modernist collective known as Les Automatistes, as early as 1941. However, their artistic influence was not quickly felt in English Canada, or indeed much beyond Montreal. [4]
Painters Eleven was the first abstract painting group in Ontario.
In 1953, Toronto artists Oscar Cahén, Walter Yarwood, and Harold Town discussed the possibility of mounting a group show of abstract paintings to strengthen public appreciation of the contemporary art form. [3] A few weeks later, William Ronald assembled seven abstract painters from Ontario, his acquaintances from previous exhibitions, to participate in a display at Simpson's in Toronto where he worked as a commercial artist, of store windows juxtaposing modern Danish and reproduction French Provincial furniture with abstract and nonobjective painting. [5] The seven artists brought together included Jack Bush, Oscar Cahén, Tom Hodgson, Alexandra Luke, Ray Mead, Kazuo Nakamura, and William Ronald.
The show was titled Abstracts at Home and a photographer named Everett Roseborough took a photograph of the seven to advertise the event that October. During the publicity photo shoot for the exhibition, Cahén proposed the group show idea, and a subsequent meeting at Alexandra Luke's cottage in Oshawa led to the inclusion of four other friends and acquaintances - Hortense Gordon, Jock Macdonald, Harold Town and Walter Yarwood. [5] The number totalled 11. [3] [6]
Town dubbed them Painters Eleven. As he said: 'Let's not go any further - we don't want to be a joke." [5]
Painters Eleven held their first exhibition at Roberts Gallery in Toronto in 1954. [7] The exhibition, arranged by Jack Bush, [8] was the first major commercial exhibition of nonobjective art in Toronto.
Unlike the Group of Seven whose members' work evolved along parallel lines, [9] Painters Eleven did not share a common artistic vision as a group apart from a commitment to abstraction. This was reflected in the diversity of the group's members. Decades separated the youngest from the eldest, and before they sold their paintings they made their living as freelance commercial artists or worked in advertising and as art teachers. Two had studied at summer schools conducted by the American abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann and William Ronald "sat in" on his classes, while others were graduates of the Ontario College of Art, and still others were self-taught. Within the group itself, the artistic center of gravity seems to have been Oscar Cahén, a gifted European émigré who became well known as an illustrator for a number of national magazines. [10]
Stylistically speaking, Painters Eleven works were characterized by "rich colour and creamy impasto and impulsive spontaneous line" [11] often accompanied by an introspective note. [12] Kazuo Nakamura's abstract works were far more subdued than those of his colleagues, and he also created figurative paintings. [13] Some art historians have speculated that Nakamura's changed mood could stem from his time in Tashme Incarceration Camp during the Second World War. [6]
In Canada's conservative art world, their first exhibition was met with confusion and disdain, typical of new art movements throughout history. By their third exhibition, in 1957, they had established abstract expressionism in Canada. Painters Eleven attained U.S. exposure with a successful exhibition in 1956 with the American Abstract Artists at the Riverside Museum in New York City, although the group was still denigrated in Toronto. [14] In 1957, they were praised by the influential New York critic Clement Greenberg on a visit he paid to the group in Toronto (Town and Yarwood abstained from meeting him). In the Canadian press, the group's most ardent supporters were art critic Robert Fulford and [art writer] Pearl McCarthy of the Globe and Mail. Eventually, the group's numbers were reduced by death and defection (Cahén was killed in a car accident in 1956, Ronald resigned in 1957 having moved to New York) and the group formally disbanded in 1960.
Painters Eleven are credited with making English Canada's art-buying public more accustomed to abstract expressionist painting. Their influence on the next generation of Canadian artists was immense, and their art is now a prominent feature in public galleries and corporate and private collections throughout Canada and in many international collections. The largest collection of their works can be found at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario. [15] Some of the group's members, notably Jack Bush, William Ronald [16] and Harold Town, [17] went on to greater success in the 1960s and 1970s. Jack Bush was given a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1976, Harold Town in 1986 and Kazuo Nakamura in 2004 and 2024. [18] Works by the group's members are now fetching higher prices at Canadian fine art auctions. The last surviving member of the group, Tom Hodgson, a former Olympic canoeist and a dedicated abstract expressionist, died in 2006.
The Canadian Group of Painters (CGP) was a collective of 28 painters from across Canada who came together as a group in 1933. Its Archives is in Queen's University, Kingston.
William Ronald Smith, known professionally as William Ronald, was an important Canadian painter, best known as the founder of the influential Canadian abstract art group Painters Eleven in 1953 and for his abstract expressionist "central image" paintings. He was the older brother of painter John Meredith (1933–2000).
Jack Hamilton Bush was a Canadian abstract painter. A member of Painters Eleven, his paintings are associated with the Color Field movement and Post-painterly Abstraction. Inspired by Henri Matisse and American abstract expressionist painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Bush encapsulated joyful yet emotional feelings in his vibrant paintings, comparing them to jazz music. Clement Greenberg described him as a "supreme colorist", along with Kenneth Noland in 1984. Bush explained that capturing the feeling of a subject rather than its likeness was
a hard step for the art loving public to take, not to have the red look like a side of a barn but to let it be the red for its own sake and how it exists in the environment of that canvas.
Kazuo Nakamura was a Japanese-Canadian painter and sculptor and a founding member of the Toronto-based Painters Eleven group in the 1950s. Among the first major Japanese Canadian artists to emerge in the twentieth century, Nakamura created innovative landscape paintings and abstract compositions inspired by nature, mathematics, and science. His painting is orderly and restrained in contrast to other members of Painters Eleven. His idealism about science echoed the beliefs of Lawren Harris and Jock Macdonald.
James Williamson Galloway Macdonald, commonly known in his professional life as Jock Macdonald, was a member of Painters Eleven, whose goal was to promote abstract art in Canada. Macdonald was a trailblazer in Canadian art from the 1930s to 1960. He was the first painter to exhibit abstract art in Vancouver, and throughout his life he championed Canadian avant-garde artists at home and abroad. His career path reflected the times: despite his commitment to his artistic practice, he earned his living as a teacher, becoming a mentor to several generations of artists.
Oscar Cahén was a Canadian painter and illustrator. Cahén is best known as a member of Painters Eleven, a group of abstract artists active in Toronto from 1953-1960, and for his fifteen years of work as an illustrator for Canadian magazines.
Ray Mead (1921–1998) was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter and a member of the artists group known as Painters Eleven. In his work, he often used a high horizon line as a structural element.
Harold Barling Town, D.Litt was a Canadian artist who worked in many different media, but is best known for his abstract paintings.
Thomas Hodgson was a Canadian sprint canoer who gained his first Canadian title in 1941 and competed in the 1950s, and also one of the acclaimed Canadian artists known as Painters Eleven. Competing in two Summer Olympics, he earned his best finish of eighth in the C-2 1000 m event at Helsinki in 1952.
The Robert McLaughlin Gallery is a public art gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. It is the largest public art gallery in the Regional Municipality of Durham, of which Oshawa is a part. The gallery houses a significant collection of Canadian contemporary and modern artwork. Housed in a building designed by noted Canadian architect Arthur Erickson, the collection focuses on works by Painters Eleven, who were founded in the Oshawa studio of Painters Eleven member Alexandra Luke.
Hortense Gordon, born Hortense Crompton Mattice, was a Canadian artist who worked abstractly in later life and became a member of Painters Eleven.
Alexandra Luke, born Margaret Alexandra Luke in Montreal, Quebec, was a Canadian abstract artist who belonged to the Painters Eleven.
Alex Cameron is a visual artist living and working in Toronto, Ontario. He is a member of what has been described as the third generation of artists inspired in their painting style by Jack Bush. During the first part of his career, Cameron fashioned elegantly drawn shapes into abstractions; in the latter part of his career, influenced by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, he sought to delineate landscape in his semi-abstract work.
Walter Yarwood was a Canadian abstract painter and a founding member of Painters Eleven. Yarwood became known for his painting beginning in the 1950s. During the 1960s he completed a number of public sculptures in Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba.
John Meredith Smith, known professionally as John Meredith, was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter. His trademark as a painter was rich, exciting colour which he combined with loosely figurative images of vertical stripes and forms or idiosyncratic calligraphy. He often used a small coloured ink drawing divided into squares as a template from which to develop his large canvases. In 1966, he began using details from still-wet drawings he had smudged – a way of working he regarded as his invention.
Gordon Rayner was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter. His way of creating art was idiosyncratic and characterized by constant innovation and often by transformation of his medium. Later, he integrated realism into his practice.
Dennis Burton was a Canadian modernist painter.
Michael Adamson is a Canadian painter, photographer and curator who is primarily known for a style that blends landscape with abstraction but abstraction wins.
Paul Sloggett is a Canadian abstract painter known for his use of geometric shapes and patterns in creating paintings and for his many teaching and administrative appointments at OCAD University, Toronto.
Gordon Webber was a multimedia pioneer of modernism in Canada. He was also an educator.
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