Dali House

Another great painting by the late Frank Black, “The Angry Atlantic”. Click the image to see a larger version.

The owner of this work and “Back Street Bermuda” tells me she and her husband bought them directly from Black on a visit to his Georgetown home around 1973 or ‘74. Her grandmother had previously bought some of his work.

Frank Black’s “Back Street Bermuda”, circa 1932
Click the image to see it much larger.

It was a really pleasant surprise to get a couple of comments on my March 2007 post on Canadian artists who aren’t well known beyond the national borders. And the comments weren’t about the brighter of these dimmer lights but about the least known of them all, Frank Black.

Frank Charles Black was a British-born, Toronto-based artist who was an associate of some members of the Group of Seven and shared their initial profession — commercial art — and their disdain for it. He retired from the business as soon as he could and moved to Georgetown, Ontario, just west of Toronto, where he taught art basics to pay the bills but finally got down to painting what he wanted to paint. He died in 1988.

The readers’ requests for more information prodded me to try and get in touch with John Sommer, proprietor of Gallery House Sol in Georgetown, which is also the town where I grew up. John knew Black fairly well, whereas I had only met the artist once, around 1976. Unfortunately House Sol doesn’t have an online address, and the local library, who I know could put us in touch, didn’t respond to my email. Georgetown does seem to be in a timewarp that way.

However, both the National Gallery of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts responded quickly and helpfully. The latter has no Frank Black works in its collection, but at least offered a list of titles from its archives:

“Georgian Bay, Minnieog”, 1922
“Broken Ice”, 1922
“Old and New”, 1930
“Midsummer Street”, 1930
“The Mill Road”, 1930
“Landscape Bermuda”, 1931
“Old Trading Ship, Bermuda”, 1933
“Near Caledon”, 1934

“Minnieog” in the first entry could be a typo, since I’ve found no references to such a place in Ontario’s Georgian Bay area. There is, however, a Minnie Rock there. Other than that, the list indicates when Black was painting in Bermuda, which was central to the queries I had from both readers.

One of them, a resident of Lansdowne, Ontario, owns the painting reproduced at the top of this post, “Back Street Bermuda”. Her grandmother, she reported, had lived in Georgetown and while there bought a handful of Frank Black paintings. A label on the back of “Bermuda” includes accreditation by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

The National Gallery sent me by regular mail a package of photocopied newspaper clippings about Black, among which I was astonished to find two articles that I’d written while I was with Georgetown’s now-defunct Halton Hills Herald. I had no idea I was in the national archives (apart from police records).

Alas, neither of the galleries was able to supply digital images of any of Black’s work or confirm that any of his paintings had been at some point part of their collections (and the Art Gallery of Ontario is in the midst of a revamp for the next few months). But from the clippings, I’ve at least been able to prepare a short biography and extract some photos. The photocopied newspaper pictures are in rough shape, which I’m afraid still shows through in my Photoshopped versions in this post. See the rest.

“Autumn in the Laurentians” by Henrietta Mabel May

Ah, feisty women painters, and they called themselves the Beaver Hall Gang. Well, Beaver Hall Group, actually, Beaver Hall Hill being a street in downtown Montreal where they had a studio at #305 during the 1920s. Most had studed at a local Art Association school that became the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where William Brymner taught them to go with modern art, and they did.

“Beaver Hall Hill” by Kathleen Morris, 1936 — check the same view on Google Earth below.

Originally there were more men than women in the group — 11 to eight — and the boss was AY Jackson, another Quebecois who was also running with the Group of Seven. Edwin Holgate was involved too. But the girls were serious and not about to be tossed off as weekend decorators. When the original outfit folded after just two years, the women strived onward as a mutually supportive unit, gradually attracting more of the sisterhood and some of them exhibiting with the Group of Seven both at home and in the States and England.

“Joseph and Marie-Louise” by Sarah Robertson, from about 1930

The best-known members went down in history as the “Final Nine”: Nora Collyer, Prudence Heward, Mabel Lockerby, Henrietta Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage and Ethel Seath. These artists made a go of the struggle, and ultimately — it took a lifetime and more — they came out on top. See the rest.

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 deKooning, 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!” See the rest.

Somewhere between the Group of Seven and their acclaimed juniors who are painting today there was a vast swath of Canadians poking away at canvases, all of whom are relevant in the big picture and most of whom are actually worth a look. I have posts coming up separately on the abstract artists of Painters 11 and the Automatistes, and will eventually get around to two other outstanding people who deserve individual consideration, Emily Carr and Graham Coughtry.

But for now, here, in no particular order, are a few of the more crusty codgers who toiled away in the Seven’s shadow and earned their vertical patches of turf on the National Gallery walls. There are many more than this; I’m just taking a sampling.

“The Cloud”, from 1942, at the top of this post, is by Bertram Brooker (1888-1955), who I think was one of the best Canadian artists who ever lived. He was a British-born writer and musician as well as a painter who was blown into Toronto in 1921 by the wind from Portage la Prairie. Freelance journalism somehow led to advertising, and thence the Arts and Letters Club, where he met Lawren Harris and others of the Seven. He and Harris must have been soul brothers, because they both ultimately soared with the spirit. See the rest.