Canadian Pictures, 1951. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1982.

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The Vancouver Art Gallery

CANADIAN PICTURES, 1951

December 4, 1982 - March 20, 1983

This exhibition was first hung in September, 1951, for the opening of the expanded and renovated Vancouver Art Gallery. The exhibition was meant to show the gallery's Canadian holdings. Needless to say, 31 years later, our Canadian collection is much richer than this small but strong beginning. In rehanging this exhibition as we prepare to leave this building — cramped and out-of-date now, but Canada's most modern gallery then — we have an opportunity to see what Canadian painting meant over thirty years ago.

The works demonstrate currents in Canadian art history which were prevalent at the time. The Group of Seven are represented with their spiritual topographies of Canada's North. Social Realism, a movement in Canadian painting of the 30's and 40's which reacted to the lack of a human element in the Group of Seven's work, is represented by Bill Winter and Orville Fisher; the existential city by Don Jarvis, Jim MacDonald and Ghitta Caiserman, and the move to abstraction in the work of Lawren Harris, Fritz Brandtner and B.C. Binning.

Painted before the influx of American ideas about painting, these works are all fairly small in scale. They are easel paintings, meant for private homes in an era, before Art Bank, The Canada Council and the growth of corporate collecting, when the sale of pictures to a private patron was still the major source of income (other than teaching) for artists in Canada.

These works also deal with images and subject-matter and have a great deal of interest as documents. That is, they record personal views of the world the artists lived in and are kind of a window to the past. Although the styles exhibited here might seem rigid or stiff today, we should remember that many of these artists were emerging from training that was grounded in nineteenth century techniques that emphasized drawing over "painting". And works like these, where line and colour are used for their emotional impact, are very much in a tradition which, far from being dead, we see revived in the "new" painting of the 1980's.

Scott Watson
Curator

Pine, Georgian Bay [in blue ink]