Description
Book SynopsisFour artists who are today relatively or almost entirely unknown one woman and three men nevertheless played a part in the aesthetic upheavals that led to abstraction in 1940s Montreal. Very active in the art milieu throughout the decade, Marian Dale Scott, Fritz Brandtner, Henry Eveleigh, and Gordon Webber captured the attention of critics of the time, who employed the term abstract art to describe both non-objective works and bold formal explorations that retained some reference to visible reality.
An examination of these artists' practices reveals a remarkable openness to international contemporary art trends French, German, British, and American. Their work and its critical reception conjure a complex picture of the debates on abstraction that took place in Montreal during the 1940s, so often reduced to the controversies surrounding the emergence of the Automatiste movement. The artistic innovations of Paul-Émile Borduas and his group and the radical tone of their 1948
