Faculty Feature:
Roald Nasgaard
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007), 432 pp.
The book is the first comprehensive history of abstract painting in Canada. It is a monumental tome containing 200 full-page color reproductions, and mines a rich vein of art history ripe for international discovery. This is especially true for the United States, which, while newly busy exploring the art of Central and South America, has yet to give serious attention to art from above its northern border.
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, contemporary with the Abstract Expressionists – not only burst onto the scene in Montreal, but also had real consequences for post-war developments in Paris.
After the Second World War, the urge to abstraction spread across Canada, manifesting itself in significant regional movements. Vancouver painters retained a British flavor, while in Toronto, the Painters Eleven, even if still a little British, looked south to New York. Montreal’s Plasticiens launched their own razor-edged interpretation of European geometric abstraction and New York color-field painting. In the sixties and seventies, the Prairies were influenced by Clement Greenberg’s post-painterly abstraction, while Halifax became an international hub of conceptual art and concrete painting.
The book continues through the eighties and nineties, decades during which advanced criticism largely ignored painting, and concludes in the twenty-first century, with abstract painting alive and well again in the studios of young artists.
Roald Nasgaard is a Professor of Art History and, for the past decade, chair of the Art Department at Florida State University. His long and distinguished museum career includes 17 years as Curator of Contemporary Art and Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, during which he oversaw innumerable exhibitions and other projects. His most seminal exhibitions and books include The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America 1890-1940 in 1984, and Gerhard Richter: Paintings in 1988. He is currently working on two exhibitions: The Urge to Abstraction, which opens at the Varley Art Gallery, Markham, Ontario in September 2007; and The Automatistes: 1940-1960, opening at the Varley in Spring 2009, and then proceeding to an American tour starting at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo.
While researching the book, in addition to time spent in libraries, archives and museum vaults, Prof. Nasgaard visited the studios and exhibitions of at least one hundred artists across Canada. The research was generously supported by the Canada Council with Travel Grants and an Independent Critics and Curators Creation/Production Grant, and by a Research Fellowship from the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives. At Florida State University, it was supported by two successive Deans, Prof. Jerry Draper and Sally McRorie, by a sabbatical leave and by a Cornerstone (AHPEG) Grant.