Painters Eleven

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Painters Eleven (variant names Painters 11 or P11) was a collective of abstract artists active in Canada from 1954 to 1960.

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[edit] History

Since the 1920s, artists in English Canada had been heavily influenced by the landscape painting of the Group of Seven, the Canadian Group of Painters and the Eastern 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, but their artistic influence was not quickly felt in English Canada, or indeed much beyond Montreal.

[edit] Formation

In 1954, eleven abstract painters from Ontario, Jack Bush, Oscar Cahén, Hortense Gordon, Tom Hodgson, Alexandra Luke, Jock Macdonald, Ray Mead, Kazuo Nakamura, William Ronald, Harold Town and Walter Yarwood, dubbed themselves Painters Eleven and held their first exhibition at the Roberts Gallery in Toronto. Conceived and led by William Ronald, it was the first major commercial exhibition of abstract art in Toronto. Unlike the Group of Seven whose members' work evolved along parallel lines, Painters Eleven shared no common artistic vision apart from a commitment to modernism and abstraction. This was reflected in the diversity of the group's members. Decades separated the youngest from the eldest, many were employed as commercial artists while others pursued careers as art teachers. Several had studied under the American abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann and others had little to no formal training. Within the group itself, the artistic center of gravity seems to have been Oscar Cahén, a gifted European émigré already well-known as an illustrator for a number of national magazines. At least three members of the group - Bush, Ronald, and Town - earned international reputations.

In Canada's conservative art world their exhibitions were often met with disdain. Nevertheless, the Painters Eleven held a successful exhibition in 1956 with the American Abstract Artists at the Riverside Gallery in New York, and were praised by the influential critic Clement Greenberg on a visit he paid to Toronto in 1957. In the Canadian press, the group's most ardent supporter was art critic Robert Fulford. Eventually, the group's numbers were reduced by death and defection (Cahén was killed in a car accident in 1956 while Ronald, their founder, resigned in 1957) and the group formally disbanded in 1960.

[edit] Influence

Painters Eleven are credited with the acculturation of English Canada's art-buying public to abstract painting. Their influence on the next generation of Canadian artists was immense, and their art is now a prominent feature in galleries and public collections throughout Canada. Some of the group's members - notably Jack Bush - went on to greater success in the 1960s and 70s. Recently, critical favour has been lavished on Kazuo Nakamura, the subject of a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2004. Works by the group's seminal members are beginning to fetch high prices at Canadian fine art auctions. The last surviving member of the group, Tom Hodgson, a former Olympian and a dedicated abstract expressionist, died in 2006.

[edit] Selected group exhibitions

  • 1957: Park Gallery, Toronto
  • 1956: Riverside Gallery, Brooklyn, NYC (with the American Abstract Artists)
  • 1954: Roberts Gallery, Toronto

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Robert Belton, The Theatre of the Self: The Life and Art of William Ronald (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999).
  • Graham Broad, "Painters Eleven: the Shock of the New" in The Beaver, February-March 2003, 20-26.
  • Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973).
  • Denise Leclerc, The Crisis of Abstraction in Canada (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1992).

[edit] External links