Jack Bush • Oscar Cahén • Hortense Gordon • Tom Hodgson • Alexandra Luke • J.W.G. (Jock) Macdonald • Ray Mead • Kazuo Nakamura • William Ronald • Harold Town • Walter Yarwood
A Toronto-centric art movement of men and women that was formed in the late autumn of 1953 to protest the stifling tastes and preferences of the artistic societies grew over the decade into a concerted effort to overturn the artistic status quo by a group of artists, who banded together and called themselves “Painters Eleven.”
While the coalition of the eleven was cohesive in purpose – make and exhibit abstract painting – in practice it represented anything but a harmonious, single voice. Each came to abstraction from different, often divergent, directions. There was no corporate style, no overriding method, no single aesthetic theory, no manifesto, and no agreed upon direction that the members should be working together to achieve except to take on tradition and shake up moribund, intolerant cultural mores.
The artists were influenced by contemporary approaches to abstraction from Europe – England, France, Germany – and from New York and New Mexico. They sought ways to impart a spiritual message, to assuage fears and phobias through automatic painting methods, and to channel directly onto their canvases the experience of living and painting in a dynamic, rapidly evolving society which appreciated audacious creativity.
Above all, Painters Eleven asked – demanded – that their viewers see things differently, their paintings in particular, the world and people around them, in the new light that abstraction cast upon them. Their aim was to wage an artistic assault – what was termed at the time as a “war” – on complacency, outmoded ideas and intolerance.
Artwork: Tom Hodgson, Light & Shade, 1956. Oil on canvas board 91.4 x 124.5 cm (36 x 49 in.) Collection of Jens Thielsen
Organized and circulated by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Toured with support from the Canadian Heritage Museums Assistance Program through Access to Heritage and generous private patrons.
