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Abstract Painting in Canada

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Roald Nasgaard
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Douglas & McIntyre, 2008 - Art - 432 pages
In the tradition of the distinguished Douglas & McIntyre art program, this lavishly illustrated and superbly printed book is a rich, readable history of abstract painting in Canada.

The story begins in the 1920s with the sometimes eccentric but remarkable work, rooted in symbolism and theosophy, of pioneers such as Kathleen Munn, Bertram Brooker and Lawren Harris. Two decades later the Automatistes-Canada's first truly independent avant-garde art movement-burst onto the scene in Montreal.
After the Second World War, the urge to abstraction spread across Canada, manifesting itself in significant regional movements. Vancouver painters retained a British flavour, while in Toronto, the Painters Eleven looked south to New York. Montreal's Plasticiens launched their own razor-edged interpretation of the European tradition of geometric abstraction. In the sixties and seventies, the Prairies were influenced by Clement Greenberg's post-painterly abstraction, while Halifax became a hub of conceptual art and concrete painting.

The book continues through the eighties and nineties, during which critics largely denounced painting, and concludes in the twenty-first century, with abstract painting alive and well again in the studios of Canada's young artists. A monumental tome containing 200 color reproductions, it mines a rich vein of art history ripe for international discovery.
  

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Contents

Acknowledgements
7
Rediscovering Abstraction
9
Pioneers of Canadian Abstraction 1920s
17
Later Pioneers 1930s and 1940s
31
The Automatistes 1940s and 1950s
53
Painters Eleven 1950s
91
Lyrical Abstraction 1950s
127
Emma Lake and the Regina Five 1960s
143
Exotic Modernism after 1970
247
Chapter n Saskatoon and Edmonton after 1970
287
PostPlasticien Painting after 1970
319
Conceptual Painting after 1970
337
Into the 1980s and 1990s
357
Chapter is At the Turn of the Millennium
375
Notes
404
Photograph Credits
420

The Plasticiens 1950s and 1960s
165
Geometric Hardedge 1960s
211
The Second Generation 1960s
231

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From Google Scholar

Fragmenting The Landscape
Joanna Asha Roznowski, Studio Art
John Kissick
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About the author (2008)

Roald Nasgaard (MA, University of British Columbia; PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Professor of Art History, and, for the past decade, Chair of the Art Department at Florida State University, began his teaching career at the University of Guelph in 1971. In the years between, before returning to academia, he had a long and distinguished museum career. From 1975 to 1978 he served as Curator of Contemporary Art and then, until 1993, as Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Among the many exhibition catalogues he authored are Yves Gaucher: A Fifteen-Year Perspective (1979); Structures for Behaviour: New Sculptures by Robert Morris, David Rabinowich, Richard Serra and George Trakas (1978); The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940 (1984); Gerhard Richter: Paintings (1988); and Pleasures of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Painting Since 1990 (2001). Other major curatorial projects at the AGO include The European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today (1985) and Free Worlds: Metaphors and Realities in Contemporary Hungarian Art. Nasgaard has held several Canada Council fellowships and grants as well as a Research Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives (2002). He won an OAAG Curatorial Writing Award in 1991 for his essay in Individualités: 14 Contemporary Artists from France. Nasgaard was born in Denmark and is a Canadian citizen.

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