Page 25 - Studio International - November 1968

Ottawa) amassed a major collection of the most advanced American facing page Les Levine Model no. S-30 (five parts)
painting, but it might be the private whim of a millionaire recluse 29-4 x 19+ x 1+ in.
Coll : Art Gallery of Ontario
for all the relevance it has locally. Toronto painting, like all Canadian
Gift from the McLean Foundation, 1966
painting, is acutely aware of its big neighbour to the south, and
highly observant of everything he does. But with every opportunity below John Meredith Courier 1967
to absorb the American experience at first-hand, Toronto artists oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in.
seem reluctant to emulate the qualities which put Americans in the Coll : Dr and Mrs Sydney L. Wax, Toronto
big league—their ability in particular to push beyond considerations
of style in order to project an image with the utmost clarity, urgency
and presence, not to mention a convincing command of the big scale.
In Toronto one is rarely conscious of the naturally big painting, nor
of imagery urgent enough to demand it. But one is often aware of
style, or styles, often as the expression of a restlessly versatile
intelligence.
Two leading Toronto painters who could not, in most ways, be
more dissimilar, but who resemble each other in both their restless-
ness and their versatility, are Michael Snow and Harold Town.
Town is a colourful controversialist (very beneficial in a wealthy,
conservative society) with a big popular reputation as something
between uomo universale and enfant terrible, and a more critical one as
an artist of brilliant natural gifts which tend to be diffused by over-
elegance and uncertainty of direction. It is sheer inventiveness which
makes him work in a number of different idioms. But it is mainly
when, Picasso-like, he restrains his exuberant facility by some process
like print-making or working in three dimensions, that he achieves
work as distinguished as his colour-etchings of the late '50s, or as
totally successful as a recent foray into light-kinetics. Michael Snow
has been sculptor, film-maker, illustrator and jazz-musician as well
as painter, and after a lengthy spell of abstraction, began in 1961 a
still-continuing series based on the leitmotiv figure of a walking
woman. Since then he has used this image in every imaginable com-
bination, transformation and visual/iconographic context, building
up an encyclopaedic catalogue of current formal possibilities. But at
the centre of all this stylistic exploration, the image of the woman
herself remains boringly banal, less an expressive obsession than a peg
for theoretical research. As with Town one is more impressed by the network spreads not only between Toronto, Montreal and Van-
skill or the intelligence than convinced by the performance. couver, but to Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, London, Halifax and
It would be too sweeping a generalization to imply that this is scores of remote schools and campuses where the eagerness to be
characteristic of Toronto, but it is part of the picture, as it is also part informed, to be kept in touch, provides its own strong undercurrent
of the picture that some of the most respected luminaries of the Tor- of experiment and enquiry. The outstanding example of the breaking
onto scene are either birds of passage or tend to centre on that city down of regionalism is, of course, the dispersal of the 'Regina group'.
without having been formed by it. Ronald Bloore, now artist in Starting in the late '50s a group of painters at the University of
residence at York University, and Jack Bush, both of them in fact Saskatchewan, including Kenneth Lochhead, Arthur McKay,
natives of Toronto, bring to it attitudes that originated in Regina. Ronald Bloore and Roy Kiyooka, were instrumental in bringing to
Reg Holmes, who came from Vancouver, spends much of his time in their summer painting-workshops at Emma Lake, over a period of
New York, and so does Les Levine, the Canadian Warhol, who is years, a succession of leading figures from New York—Barnett New-
perhaps the most dynamic of a younger generation working in the man, Noland, Olitski and Clement Greenberg among them. Regina
environmental field and with plastics. But a painter who, in the suddenly became the home of the best-informed and most advanced
steadiness and consistency of his development, is one of the few who painters in Canada, and when Greenberg organized his 'post-
seems to have emerged out of what must be regarded as an intrinsic- painterly abstraction' exhibition in New York in 1964, he included
ally characteristic Toronto situation, is John Meredith. His highly Regina painters in it, notably Jack Bush. Most of these painters have
personal language of abstract symbols, deployed over the canvas like been influential teachers, and in the last few years the attitudes of
the growth of some richly elaborated surrealist organism, owes Regina have been decisively felt right across Canada. Kiyooka went
something to the Abstract Expressionist wave which reached its to Vancouver and is now in Montreal: Lochhead is in Winnipeg;
height in Toronto in the early '60s, but has been able to move Bloore and Bush in Toronto.
beyond it without totally rejecting it. His painting retains a presence And yet, against the anti-isolationist effects of this diaspora, one has
and emotional commitment which have nothing to do with America, to take into account the opposite phenomenon of continuing isolation
and it looks quite unselfconscious about the fact. or a quite deliberately cultivated regionalism. Isolated even in
The coming and going in Toronto, the consequent diversity of its Regina is a tiny pocket of Biederman-orientated constructivism
allegiances, its unsettled character, all reflect that this is what is around Eli Bornstein. At the other extreme is a relatively flourishing
happening to Canadian art as a whole at the moment. The pattern manifestation of illusionistically-detailed realism in the Maritimes.
of regional centres is still very strong, reinforced by distance and But something quite different has happened in London, Ontario,
isolation, but there is also a growing pattern of inter-change between where for no apparent reason an entirely independent art-scene, with
them, leading both to constant re-grouping of forces and at the same local loyalties but far from provincial attitudes, its own sculptors,
time to an accelerating dissemination of ideas and influences. The movie-makers and intermedia-men, its own avant-garde gallery, has
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