Splash Page THE PLASTICIENS AND BEYOND MONTREAL 1955 - 1970 Varley Art Gallery of Markham CONTACT INFO Varley Art Gallery 216 Main St Unionville, ON L3R 2H1 905-477-9511 ext. 3263 http://www.visitthevarley.com/ ABOUT THE GALLERY The Varley Story The Group of Seven The Group of Seven is famously known to have established a distinct aesthetic to the Canadian landscape, its members are historically recognized for the impact they have made on the Canadian art movement. Frederick Varley, Tom Thomson, J.E.H MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frank Johnston, and Franklin Carmichael would first meet as employees at the design firm Grip Ltd in Toronto. These six men would come together during and after work discussing bold new directions for Canadian Art, they were joined by A.Y Jackson and Lawren Harris in 1913. With the support of Dr. James MacCallum, an artist and university professor, the group raised money to build the Studio Building for Canadian Art in Toronto. It was there that they would create masterpieces as they discovered the distinct light of the Canadian atmosphere and capture it in bold new ways. The production the group was interrupted as they suffered tragedy when Tom Thomson, one of the founding members died in mysterious circumstances; shortly after, some of the members left to serve in the First World War. It was not until 1920 that the Group of Seven officially formed with their first exhibition in Toronto. Once their popularity grew, the artists began to travel Canada capturing what inspired them. The group shared a like vision concerning art in Canada. They were imbued with the idea that an art must grow and flower in the land before the country would be a real home for its people. The group was not limited to its seven founding members; they eventually changed their name to the Canadian Group of Painters. In total, the group included eleven members: Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, J.E.H MacDonald, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, A.J. Casson, Edwin Holgate, and LeMoine FitzGerald. The Group of Seven’s determi- nation and belief in Canadian culture prevails to this day. They have become the most famous artists in Canadian history and are great contributors to Canadian culture symbolizing for many a concept of a distinctly Canadian Identity. Frederick Varley Frederick Horsman Varley or Fred as he is more commonly known, is often recog- nized as Canada’s greatest portrait artist and lyrically expressive landscape painters. Varley was born in Sheffield, England in 1881 where he studied fine art. In 1909 he married and later immigrated to Canada where he got a job in the design firm Grip Ltd in Toronto. It was there that he met a group of artists that would later form the Group of Seven. Renowned for their contribution to Canadian art, the artists were joined by their frustration of the lack of Canadian art that was being created at the time. Originally a portrait artist, Varley sought to introduce a new note of candid portrayal of the human form. Ironically, he is best known for his landscapes. He later integrated the human figure into landscape in a manner that spoke of happiness and laughter. Varley’s reputation landed him success in various art exhibitions and a position as the head of the department of painting and drawing at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts. He would be the first to acknowledge British Columbia’s unfamiliar landscapes which had opened him to fresh modes of expression. Howev- er his prosperity was short-lived after drastic pay cuts to his job, failing business and art ventures, and a break up with his wife. His efforts to capitalize on his paintings failed, he stopped painting, and was left penniless. Varley eventually picked up the paint brush again, his desire to follow his passion lead him to various places but it was not until much later in his life he was recognized for ABOUT LES PLASTICIENS Four young artists, all in their mid-to-late twenties—Jauran, Louis Belzile, Jean-Paul Jérôme, Fernand Toupin—unveiled a personal exhibition, Les Plasticiens, in the gallery space at L’Échourie (February 11 to March 2, 1955). They promoted their cause with a strikingly designed abstract-geometric poster and with a manifesto, the Manifeste des Plasticiens, that defined their aesthetic program. The event has been called Montreal’s second avant-garde revolution after the Automatistes in the 1940s. Geometrism had a history that reached back to his own genera- tion’s rejection during the 1940s of the geometric styles that dominated abstract art in the years before the Second World War. The latter’s strictures and idealist ideologies had come to look quite irrelevant in the face of the liberating spontaneity that Surrealism offered. This was a prejudice the Automatistes’ generation had shared with their Abstract Expressionist contemporaries in New York. Certainly the Plasticien program, more firmly than anything heretofore in Montreal, rejected Automatisme’s pictorial illusionism and its accompanying poetic and narrative allusions, and it did so by refocusing aesthetic attention onto the immediate plastic facts of painting—tone, texture, form and line—and attributing to these plastic facts an inherent capacity for dynamic artistic expression. All four artists had previously participated in two of the group exhibi- tions held regularly at a Montreal bookstore, the Librairie Tranquille: first in late spring 1954, after which they began to meet weekly to discuss painting issues, and then during the following fall. When the latter show was given coverage in L’Autorité on November 6, 1954, the review not only singled out the four of them but also dubbed them, perhaps for the first time, “Plasticiens” and hailed them as the true artists of the future. This was more than good luck, however, because the reviewer was in fact one of their own, Jauran, writing under a pseudonym. The title of his hardly disinterested review is self-explanatory, “Après les automa- tistes et les romantiques du surréalisme: Les Plasticiens.” His review was in effect a practice run for the 1955 manifesto. Other supportive reviews followed, including a broadcast on Radio-Canada on November 16, 1954, in which Leduc praised the same four artists for their formal rigour, which he said offered a “salutary counterweight” to the Surrealism that still predominat- ed among the young painters. Former Automatiste that he was, however, Leduc could not resist issuing a warning to be careful of the word “plasticien,” anxious that it might “imply the disem- bodiment of painting” or reduce it to some kind of “square-circle-triangle” décor. Artist Biography LOUIS BELZILE Louis Belzile was a painter and sculptor. In the mid-1950s Belzile was formally the most illusionistic of the first Plasticiens. In his compositions he preferred busy curving cubistic interweaves, glowing with inner light and receding shadows. His surfaces are always thick with paint and conspicuously textured with the palette knife, stylistic characteristics he does not abandon even as he flattens his compositions and sharpens his edges. When he tautens his geometry in the later 1950s his images often function as signs, diagrams or architectural structures. At mid-decade he was experimenting with irregularly shaped canvases. In his later work, Louis Belzile devoted himself to painting the effects of light on a ground of evanescent geometric forms. Pieces by Artist CAT. 9 Untitled, 1955 Oil on board 73.2 x 31.5 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1992.289) This piece uses the rhomboid format with miniaturist Paul Klee–like jauntiness. Its soft-edged squares and rectangles are flat, on the surface and playfully dispersed, such that they jostle for lateral position as well as push and pull within optical space. Organized as a Cubist grid, delicately conceived and executed, but with its rectangular facets splayed out across its panel surface. CAT. 10 Untitled, c. 1957–58 Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard 81 x 101.5 cm Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, gift of Martine Brossard (D 97 64 P 1) His surfaces are always thick with paint and conspicuously textured with the palette knife, stylistic characteristics he does not abandon even as he flattens his compositions and sharpens his edges. When he tautens his geometry in this later piece, his images often function as signs, diagrams or architectural structures. CAT. 11* The Circle, 1957–58 Oil on board 73.1 x 71 cm Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, purchase (1992.149) Belzile preferred busy curving cubistic interweaves, glowing with inner light and receding shadows in his compositions. His surfaces are always thick with paint and conspicuously textured with the palette knife, stylistic characteristics he does not abandon even as he flattens his compositions and sharpens his edges. When he tautens his geometry in the later 1950s including this piece. His images often function as signs, diagrams or architectural structures. Artist Biography CHARLES GAGNON Charles Gagnon was more ambiguously a post-Plasticien. He was more a post-sec- ond-generation Abstract Expressionist. Nor is he Post-Painterly in the American sense, yet he works with fields of colour and hard edges. He is also elusive, because he worked indiscriminately across a variety of media: film, photography, collage and Duchampian box constructions as well as painting. While nominally an abstract painter, he always stayed close to nature and perhaps never really abandoned the landscape. He produced work uncompro- misingly abstract and he kept the perceptual experience of his paintings openly self-con- scious events, resistant to final resolutions. Charles Gagnon considered artmaking a form of communion that aspired to a non-intellectual, spiritual dimension.