Canadian Art

G

Advances in Sculpture

Modernism brought other changes to Canadian art. When the concepts of abstraction influenced sculpture, as they had painting, sculpture gained importance and assumed a more equal footing with painting. Museums rapidly increased their collections of sculpture and held more exhibitions solely dedicated to the medium.

Some sculptors of the 1950s and 1960s interwove abstract shapes into structures that retained sculpture’s traditional concern for mass and solidity, but they gave their works a new freedom of movement that seemed to defy gravity. These sculptors included Kosso Eloul, Sorel Etrog, and Hugh LeRoy in Toronto and Henry Saxe and Armand Vaillancourt in Montréal. Several painters in Canada also made three-dimensional objects of layered abstract forms that functioned as floor or wall sculpture. Among these artists were Gerald Gladstone and Michael Snow in Toronto and Ulysse Comtois and Françoise Sullivan in Montréal. Carving by First Nations artists, such as Bill Reid from British Columbia, began to receive wider public attention in the 1960s. The government of Canada set up a federal agency to publicize the art of contemporary native painters and assist them in selling their sculpture and prints across the country.

H

Government Support for Art

In the mid-20th century and after, official government support became increasingly important for the development and promotion of Canadian visual arts. The Canadian Museums Association, established in 1947, contributed to the professionalism of the country’s public art galleries. Beginning in the 1950s, a network of university art galleries developed across Canada. These university museums and public art galleries quickly became the principal sponsors for publications on Canadian art.

A report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, issued in 1952, led to the establishment of the Canada Council in 1957. The Canada Council provides funding to contemporary artists and art organizations across the country. In the late 1950s, construction of new government and corporate buildings led to commissions for sculpture and painting and provided more public sites for art.

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By the early 1960s, the federal government in Ottawa had created a department to support Canadian museum programs and help sponsor exhibitions of Canadian art in other countries. Art magazines provided new venues for critical writing. They included Vie des Arts, which began publication in 1957, and artscanada. The major event for the promotion of Canadian visual arts during this period was undoubtedly Montréal’s Expo ’67, Canada’s first world’s fair. Its numerous exhibitions celebrated the 100th anniversary of Canada’s confederation.

VII

Recent Canadian Art: 1970s to the 2000s

Canadian art changed radically during the last three decades of the 20th century. The traditional arts of painting and sculpture were infiltrated by photography, video, and other forms of technology, as well as by mixed-media installations. As artists experimented with new materials and technologies, the combination of several artistic media in a single artwork became the dominant characteristic of Canadian art.

At the same time, Canadian artists, like artists elsewhere, began to question the role of the artist in society. Artists reflected on social and political issues such as the environment, multiculturalism, communication, sexual identity, and the meaning of Canadian history. As artists across the country questioned the purposes of art in a universal context, earlier regional differences and distinctions in Canadian art-making became less apparent and less important.

Many new resources became available for presenting and understanding contemporary visual culture. They include the Canada Council Art Bank, which purchases artwork and then loans it to government and art institutions, and public galleries dedicated to modern art, such as the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Power Plant in Toronto. From the early 1970s on, artist-run exhibition spaces and documentation centers have been established in every city in Canada. These alternative galleries quickly became the principal sites for showing avant-garde art. Canadian art has received exposure abroad in international exhibitions such as the biennials held in Venice, Italy, and São Paulo, Brazil, and in solo and survey shows at various galleries and museums. Canadian art periodicals that began publication in the late 20th century include Parachute, Parallellogramme, C Magazine, and The Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien.

A

Conceptual Art

Conceptual art was the first of the late-century movements to challenge the traditional meaning of art. This international movement, which arose out of the social and political unrest of the late 1960s, dominated Western art of the 1970s and the early 1980s. Conceptual artists in Canada and elsewhere questioned the relevance of art in a rapidly changing society through their emphasis on concepts and ideas over the creation of a tangible and saleable object. Their efforts to rid art of the physical object were considered anti-art.

Two groups that produced early examples of conceptual art were the N. E. Thing Co. in Vancouver and General Idea in Toronto. Their projects focused on contemporary means of communication by using the technologies of mass media. Other early forms of conceptualism were performance art and body art, in which artists incorporated aspects of theater, dance, and technology in an actual performance or other event. Much of conceptual art was created for a specific site and dismantled after the exhibition or the event ended. As a result, photographs provide the only lasting record of many of these works.

A

1

Photographic Imagery

Some artists associated with conceptualism began to use photography in the 1970s to challenge traditional artistic values, and because of them photography is an essential part of Canadian art today. Gabor Szilasi and Geoffrey James in Montréal and Lynne Cohen in Toronto questioned the nature of documentary photography by concentrating on ordinary and incidental aspects of the everyday environment. In contrast, Angela Grauerholz and Genevieve Cadieux in Montréal and Suzy Lake in Toronto distorted images—by cropping, blurring, fragmenting, framing, or other manipulation—so that the facts of reality become less specific and less clear.

Other artists used photographs along with film and videotape to create multilayered images of contemporary society. Prominent among the many artists who combined seemingly contradictory images of people and places to create new stories are Michael Snow and Vera Frenkel in Toronto and Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas, and Roy Arden from Vancouver. In another ongoing experiment these artists and others, including Liz Magor and Jamilie Hassan in Ontario, assemble works from numerous photographs that describe various moments in time, but not necessarily in chronological order.

Large-scale color photographs, influenced in subject matter and composition by television, motion pictures, and advertising, have created new definitions of portraiture, as seen in work by Evergon in Montréal, Jeff Wall in Vancouver, and Shelagh Alexander in Toronto. In work that combines everyday objects with photographs, videos, and other film-based imagery, Eric Cameron, Ian Carr Harris, Robin Collyer, and John Massey explore contemporary culture and suggest the distance that has developed between nature and technology.

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