A year of milestones for Canada’s modernist men | Canada Voices

Saskatchewan artist Eli Bornstein will celebrate his 102nd birthday on Dec. 28. A committed abstractionist known for his three-dimensional reliefs, Bornstein is one of the last of a generation of visual artists who championed international modernism in Canada in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

This year was also the centenary of the birth of the prolific Toronto painter Harold Town, a member of the Painters Eleven group who died in 1990, and saw the publication of two important books on his contemporaries. One is a massive four-volume catalogue devoted to fellow Painters Eleven member Jack Bush, perhaps English Canada’s most recognized abstract painter, who died in 1977 at age 67. The other book seeks to reclaim a lesser-known figure, the Saskatchewan-born Toronto painter Mashel Teitelbaum, who died in 1985 at age 64. Bornstein’s birthday punctuates a year of milestones, a taking-stock of what these men – and most of the artists of their generation were men – achieved.

“This is not art made for the church, not art made for society,” said Sarah Stanners, the independent scholar who has assembled the 2,176 page, 17-kilogram catalogue raisonné that includes all of Bush’s paintings, from 1920 to 1977. “Modernist painting is art made for art, art that’s really coming from the guts of feelings.”

Postwar modernist abstraction in its most stringent form typified art for art’s sake: A painting was about itself, not about a spiritual quest, not about nature or even natural rhythms – nor about a nationalistic agenda of the kind that animated the Group of Seven.

But few Canadian modernists were actually this pure. Art historian Roald Nasgaard, an expert on abstraction in Canada who is writing a book about Bornstein, says that the artist who lived in Saskatoon with a view of the South Saskatchewan River couldn’t help but refer to the forms he saw in the Prairies. In later work, he even developed a certain mysticism about nature. Bornstein’s Structurist works, as he dubbed them, were pleasing reliefs, part sculpture, part painting, bright horizontal panels with vertical strips of coloured acrylic or wood, that could be read as landscapes.

In contrast Bush, who was well recognized in the U.S. early in his career, was a colour-field painter who could satisfy the notoriously demanding New York critic Clement Greenberg – although his art could push back, too.

“Bush was embraced by the colour-field group like Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis and Friedel Dzubas. But there was also a way he could both obey the rules and flaunt them at the same time,” Nasgaard said.

Nasgaard tells an amusing story from his days as a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he had acquired a large Bush canvas, Salmon Concerto of 1975, and proudly showed it to Greenberg. Looking at the work – a series of coloured bars that, as its title suggests, dance across a pink background in a lively horizontal movement – Greenberg announced it was not a good painting: “Because you can’t see it in one glance.”

“The point was it’s almost like a musical score. You do read it from left to right,” Nasgaard said, explaining that Greenberg objected to a painting that had to be experienced through time – rather than making an immediate optical impact. “Dogma didn’t allow that.”

Town, a colourful personality, man about town and a commercial success in his lifetime, refused to meet Greenberg when the critic visited Toronto: He didn’t need someone telling him whether his art was any good. A consummate draftsman who loved to draw, Town created many phases of work, experimenting with both abstract and representational styles.

“He’s a hard one to peg,” said Christopher Cutts, the Toronto dealer who represents the Town estate. “If you saw two bodies of work you won’t think it was the same artist. … In the fifties he was an abstract expressionist: His paintings were as good as anyone’s.” In the 1970s, he bought an antique toy horse and went on to make 800 images of it; he also made hundreds of his “Snap” paintings by repeatedly snapping a paint-loaded string across a canvas.

Teitelbaum was equally eclectic, painting abstractions in the 1950s and 1960s but turning in the 1970s to the landscape and the human figure. These included a remarkable series of multimedia paintings, padded with layers of paint-covered plastic skins, that offered loose copies of Rembrandt and Cezanne portraits, a prescient encounter with the weight of historic art that foreshadowed the concerns of postmodernism.

“He had no patience for the modernism of Greenberg, that formalism,” said Andrew Kear, the London, Ont. curator who edited the new book Mashel Teitelbaum: Terror and Beauty, a project initiated by the artist’s son, museum director Matthew Teitelbaum. “He was a romantic, the existential was what mattered. … It was about human suffering, human connection.”

Teitelbaum was a prime example of Stanners’s “art of the gut” for a difficult reason: Determinedly anti-establishment, he struggled with bipolar disorder throughout his life, and his erratic behaviour sometimes hampered his career.

Preserving the legacy of these artists is a gargantuan task. Stanners spent 13 years working on the Bush catalogue, largely funded by Toronto theatre impresario David Mirvish, a major collector of colour field painting. A catalogue raisonné records an artist’s entire oeuvre and serves as the ultimate assurance of posthumous success. There are very few Canadian artists afforded that treatment; David Milne is one; a Jean-Paul Riopelle catalogue raisonné is in progress.

Both Stanners and Cutts think it’s time for a second look at Town, a major retrospective, but a catalogue raisonné that would secure his legacy seems a real longshot.

“I don’t think generation Z has a clue who these men are,” Cutts said.

Mid-century modern design is fashionable these days; people gravitate to the practical surfaces and clean lines of teak tables and globular lamps. But the art-for-art’s sake philosophy behind modernist painting could not be further from current art, which is often documentary in approach and political in motivation.

Still, for those in the know, powerful paintings hold their appeal.

“Right now there’s a room of Jack Bush paintings at the AGO,” said Stanners, referring to the Moments in Modernism show, which includes Salmon Concerto. “I think it’s pretty popular because you get to just stand and swim in this colour. That’s what turns me on to modernism, this kind of sensorial experience. Maybe the younger generation welcomes that … It’s just about having a body-to-body experience with art.”

Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné is published by David Mirvish Books and Coach House Press; Mashel Teitelbaum: Terror & Beauty is published by Work Book Editions and Goose Lane. Eli Bornstein: Life & Work will be available on the Art Canada website Dec. 18.