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!” See the rest.

A bit more on the Artist.Ranking (A.R) system mentioned in our Rousseau biography, as found at ArtFacts.net.

As mentioned, lonely old Henri is currently ranked #724 with a bullet on this overtly mercenary chart, which arranges 62,436 artists by volume of exhibitions over the last five years.

Picasso is #1, Cezanne 32 and Monet 62, just to grab some examples.

“The basis of the A.R thinking is the so-called economy of attention (after a book from Georg Franck),” the website explains. “Franck says that attention (fame) in the cultural world is an economy that works with the same mechanisms as capitalism. Capitalist, or economic, behaviour is based on property, lending money and charging interest.

“For Franck, the curator (eg the museum director or the gallery owner) acts as a financial investor. The curator/investor lends their property (their exhibition space and their fame) to an artist from whom they expect a return on their investment in the form of more attention (reputation, fame etc).”

Here’s the top 10 after Picasso: Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg, Henri Matisse, Edward Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.* See the rest.

I could remember only a couple of things about futurism from my art history course at university – speed, and Umberto Boccioni’s fast little statuette, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space”, of which I made a drawing at the time.

I was never quite sure of the fuel behind this flamboyant bunch of hard-nosed Italians who seemed to love the fascists as much as they worshipped motion and, being quick, burned out just as fast as Mussolini.

Gino Severini’s “Armoured Train in Action” from 1915

Reading again about them lately, it surprises me that some didn’t end up like Il Duce, hung by the heels, quite dead, and spattered with rotten tomatoes. It’s eseential to be passionate about one’s art, but these guys would beat you up, noisily and with great gusto, if you disagreed with their point of view.

Then again, the futurists created some wonderful paintings, sculpture, poetry and prose, and if my art history prof had had the time, he might have placed this in front of me:

“We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts.” See the rest.

Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi have a page of screed on the Web about Barney Newman that’s billed as an “online supplement” to the 2000 book “What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand”. Edited here for style and length, not inanity. See also A right old Barney.

Three decades ago Hilton Kramer proclaimed that abstract expressionism is among the outstanding achievements of American culture in this century, “by virtue of the worldwide critical esteem [its artists] have enjoyed and the crucial artistic influence they have wielded”. Although postmodernist scholars and critics have in recent years challenged such an exalted view, the work of leading abstract expressionists continues to occupy a pre-eminent status in 20th-century culture, and still influences contemporary abstract painters. See the rest.

“Mignon”, by William Bouguereau (1825-1905).
Click the image to see it much larger.

Fred Ross, the huffing and puffing iron lung of the Art Renewal Centre, insists that (a) abstract art is not abstract and defintely not art, and (b) Michelangelo and Ross’ main go-to guy William Bouguereau were great abstract artists. He shall explain in his own words, excerpted from his voluptuous website.

“Mignon”, above, by the way, was no mere filet. She was owned by Andy Warhol until his death. And Dali had a Bouguereau in his collection too. No studies have been done, to my knowledge, on possible links between owning a Bouguereau and dying. See the rest.