Dali House

One autumn day in 1953 abstract art landed with a thump, like a heavy, unexpected snowfall, on what used to be called Toronto the Good. Splay-footed pedestrians passing Simpson’s mammoth department store at Queen and Yonge Streets were the eyewitnesses. They were used to the home-furnishings window displays and the fur-clad mannequins, but something had gone mightily askew here. The window was full of weird paintings, possibly from one one of those new-fangled UFOs everyone was talking about.

This decidedly non-gallery setting was where seven young Canadians vented the fever of the affliction that had overtaken New York.

The instigator was William Ronald, who did the artwork for Simpson’s ads and handled the window dressing at the store. His biggest challenge until then had been trying to outdo the displays at rival retail behemoth Eaton’s.

Ronald’s bold stroke got enough attention for him and the other six live wires involved in the plot that they — joined by four others and calling themselves Painters Eleven — got an exhibition the following February at the Roberts Gallery further down Yonge.

The Group of Seven had quietly blazed new paths in the woods, and with their adherents pretty much painted “every damn tree in the country”, as another top Canadian artist, Graham Coughtry, put it. Painters Eleven — Alexandra Luke, Harold Town, Oscar Cahén, Kazuo Nakamura, Jack Bush, Hortense Gordon, Walter Yarwood, Ray Mead, Tom Hodgson, Jock Macdonald and William Ronald — were chattering ice cutters noisily opening the Northwest Passage.

Ronald (1926-98) was born in Stratford, Ontario — a place that thinks it’s Shakespeare’s birthplace, complete with an Avon River — and, upon finishing studies at the Ontario College of Art, went to New York to study with Hans Hofmann. He got to go because he was a hockey player and won a $1,000 Canadian Amateur Hockey Association scholarship. Now that’s Canadiana.

In 1955 Painters Eleven had another show at the Roberts Gallery, and then Ronald moved to New York, where hi-so collector Countess Ingeborg de Beausac bought one of his paintings, and art dealer Samuel Kootz, who represented the prizefighters Kline, Rothko and de Kooning, as well as Hofmann, got interested, grabbed five more works, one of which ended up at the Guggenheim. Nice. Two years later the New York Times gave Ronald’s first American solo show a good write-up too.

“Kline complimented me on my work. I couldn’t believe it!” Ronald told a writer from ArtFocus magazine in 1997. “Rothko came to the Kootz Gallery later, when no one was there. He sat down and looked at one of my paintings for 20 minutes. I never spoke to him. I was shell-shocked!”

Ronald returned to Toronto a bemedalled hero and had a slew of exhibitions, but he remained a New Yorker for another seven years, churning out 18 canvases per annum for Kootz. The contract was abruptly terminated in 1963, though, perhaps because buyers were by then preferring a little less expressionism in their abstraction. The Pollock epidemic had run its course.

Ronald came home and did TV work, painted a big mural for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and, by 1972, was hard up enough for cash that he was giving lessons to me at York University. It wasn’t a memorable arrangement for me and I’m confident it wasn’t for him either. In fact I don’t recall a single class, but to be fair, I couldn’t hear much at the time over the roar of the mounting debt that would soon flush away my artsy ambitions.

The graphic-arts faculty was a motley array anyway. York was a young school then, with more money than it knew what to do with. I see that Tim Whiten is still there. He “taught” me “drawing”. I have no idea what that was about — something to do with pencils, I think.

We also had David Gilhooly showing us the basics of ceramics, but mostly showing us slides of the “funky” ceramic frogs that made him “famous”. His Queen Victoria frog was always good for a chuckle. I googled him recently and learned that he’d dumped his pottery in ‘96 and is now savaging Jesus in assemblages and Plexiglas.

When Ronald applied for a Canada Council grant, he was asked what he’d do with the cash if he got it, and he joked, “I’d paint the Prime Ministers or something.” He got the dough and the news media reminded him of what he’d said. Ronald’s first task was to paint portraits of the country’s 16 premiers.

More great Canadiana.

One of the best of the PMs, Pierre Trudeau, opened the show at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1984 and it went on tour ad mare usque a mare, as the national motto has it.

In his final years there were occasional new works and tribute shows as Ronald toiled out of a former Bell Telephone office low-rise (later renamed the William Ronald Building) in the miniature Ontario city of Barrie. Tooling around in an old Rolls Royce with a pair of babe-assistants taking turns being the chauffeur, Ronald rode in the back seat wearing sunglasses. If his face were a bit more recognisable, a picture of him might be a suitable illustration for the definition of the phrase “big frog in a small pond”.

The “Abstracts at Home” exhibition that Ronald and the Painters Eleven-to be held at Simpson’s department store in late 1953 was abstract art’s first cannonade in Canada, but there had been shots across the public’s bow earlier, not just a show by nine Ontario painters organised by Alexandra Luke the year before, but for several years some pretty volatile efforts by a Montreal group called the Automatistes. More on them another time.

Painters Eleven were in a sense brought together by photographer Everett Roseborough, who needed a shot for a magazine story on the Toronto show. They looked at each other and figured they’d better form a union and pool their money for the next assault. In the photo, from left: Hodgson, Cahén, Luke, Nakamura, Mead, Bush and one cool-looking Bill Ronald.

Harold Town, who cut quite an everywhere-you-look figure when I was coming of age in the ’60s with his wild sideburns and expository patter, once said that the Eleven “weren’t really militant and we were terribly innocent. We never expected to sell any pictures and we paid for those exhibitions ourselves. We paid for the booze, the folders, the transportation and insurance.”

Once Town came up with the name, they set about arranging their first proper show, and that happened in February 1954 at the Roberts. No one bought anything, and not a great many works sold at the exhibitions of ‘55 through ‘58 either, but eventually the National Gallery of Canada helped them out. It took the press quite a while to calm down and stop shouting.

In terms of abstraction, Macdonald, being the oldest, was the trailblazer and to many in the group the teacher.

James Williamson Galloway “Jock” Macdonald (1897-1960) hailed from Thurso, Scotland, and arrived in Canada in his 20s to teach design at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, the first in a long series of places he filled impressionable young heads with possibilities.

The Group of Seven’s Fred Varley showed him a thing of two in oils and Jock took it from there, evolving from Seven tendencies into abstraction and then surrealism, a transition goosed along by theosophy. Seen here is “Fleeting Breath” from 1959.

Nature seen through a mystic’s eyes is certain a recurring theme in flora-intensive Canada, and Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, where Macdonald painted in the mid-1930s, can certainly have that specific effect. With Varley he founded the BC College of Arts, then moved east to Banff, and then more east to teach at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto.

One of Jock’s students in Banff was Montreal-born Alexandra Luke (1901-60), who was originally going to be a nurse but then got married, widowed, married again (into big corporate cash) and pregnant before finally getting around to art. Macdonald also taught her about Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, so she got mystical too. In 1947 she started doing “automatic” paintings, which are going to be fairly abstract regardless of what you set out to do.

Luke also fed from the hand of Hofmann in the US and got Macdonald and Ronald to try him out too. It was she who organised the crucial Canadian Abstract Exhibition, and it was at her summer cottage at Thickson’s Point, Ontario, that Painters Eleven amalgamated. Curiously, the hi-so set that her hubby ran with, who knew her as Margaret McLaughlin, had no idea she was the successful painter Alexandra Luke.

Also mentored by Hofmann was Hortense Gordon (1886-1961), a Hamiltonian who over the years would coach a lot of other kids in turn. She was, in fact, sort of the Painters Eleven schoolmarm, though perhaps not as biddy-ish as her spinster sister Marion Mattice, who was trained for art but got stuck with the job of looking after their mom in her old age while Hortense went off gallivanting with the jazz crowd.

I’m stretching boring fact there. Alexandra Luke and Hortense Gordon did a heck of a lot for abstract art in Canada, but you know what? They show up in few Canadian art history texts. Even tracking them down on the Web takes some doing.

Ray Mead (1921-98) tends to fall through the cracks too for some reason, even though it was he and and Oscar Cahén (1916-56) who’d injected some European flair into the Eleven, thanks to their time spent overseas.

Oscar, on the other hand, is the cornerstone of both his own website and the Cahén Foundation, which is this year helping Town’s and May’s people put together a “comprehensive” site for the Eleven. I’m crossing my fingers that they’re not referring to http://Painters11.com, which is being nailed together at the moment, complete with jazz music playing. Judging from the glimpses visible through the construction-site peephole, it’s not going to very comprehensive.

But on his own posthumous site Cahén emerges as quite an interesting character. There’s some glum German expressionism in his early stuff, but he got over it and the hues became brighter as his figures disintegrated, then things went all monochromatic again. On view here, “The Warrior”, 1956.

Jack Bush (1909-71) was more like the New York single-fielders. He grew up in Montreal before enrolling at the Ontario College of Art, where Charles Comfort and JEH MacDonald were among his instructors. Bush too picked up on John Lyman and the Automatistes. Pictured here, “Red Vision”, 1958.

Thomas Hodgson (1924- ) withstood the lion’s share of the critical stones thrown in the general direction of the Eleven, because Canadians were particularly confused / incensed by Pollock-style action painting, and Hodgson was literally waving a red flag with enormous canvases of pink, orange and crimson. Seen here is “Soil”, from 1950.

Among the noisily expressive Eleven, Kazuo Nakamura (1926-2002) was the cool and calm pond, the place to go and resupply ready for the next seige. He was all about abstracts and landscapes up until the 1970s, and then fell into numerology in a big way — sequences, diagrams and other sets of number forming structures — seeking “some key to form and design in nature”. I am not at all sure if he ever found the key. Pictured here is “Into Space 3″ from 1957.

In terms of personal evolution, self-taught Toronto ad illustrator Walter Yarwood (1917-96) ultimately got the hell out of painting altogether. He abandoned it for sculpture by 1960, carving up metal rather than furrows of oil on a canvas. The photo shows him installing “Pines” outside the Ontario provincial legislature at Queen’s Park in 1968.

Harold Town (1924-90) ended up almost by default the superstar after the Eleven split up. He’d been their most outspoken advocate, and afterward he applied his talent for orchestrating the news media to himself as he, Picasso-like, churned out all kinds of product in all kinds of genres, including a striking biography of Tom Thomson called “The Silence and the Storm”, a column in Toronto Life magazine and portraits of celebrities like John and Yoko. The one here is “The Tower of Babbling”, from 1955.

The disproportionately influential American critic Clement Greenberg deigned to visit the Eleven’s Toronto studios in 1957 and the group, knowing he could aid their acceptance and enhance their price tags, chipped in on his travel expenses — except for Town and Yarwood. Some thought their refusal to pay “tribute money” was genuinely nationalistic and protectionist, others that Town, at least, was just being a self-serving poseur. Plus, he didn’t need Greenberg’s help.

In the final analysis, Painters Eleven may have been a union, but they were all seeing things differently.

Bush’s “Big A”, 1968

By the time they had their last annual show at the Park Gallery in 1958, Oscar Cahén was dead, Ray Mead had moved to Montreal and Town and Ronald were prepared to duke it out between them for solo fame and glory. The members took a vote in 1960 and called it quits, having done what they set out to do — acquire fame and plenty of wall space in the big taxpayers’ galleries.