Marc-Aurèle Fortin

Marc-Aurèle Fortin

Marc Aurèle Fortin was a Canadian painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. During his lifetime, he produced an estimated ten thousand paintings, many of which have been lost over the years. He is known for his decorative, colourful, and picturesque landscapes. He often painted leafy trees, rustic homes, hay carts, and scenes of Montreal featuring isolated human figures overshadowed by nature.

Fortin was born in Sainte-Rose, Quebec in 1888 and studied in Montreal under Ludger Larose and Edmond Dyonnet and at the Art Institute of Chicago. During his studies in Chicago, the works of Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, and Jean-François Millet served as great sources of inspiration.

He captured scenes of Montreal, Sainte-Rose, Quebec City, the Île d’Orléans, Charlevoix, and the Gaspé. Fortin traveled to France several times during his career to draw and paint. He experimented with printmaking, watercolour, oil paint, and pastels. He also often painted on black and grey surfaces to achieve more luminous colour.

Fortin’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout Canada and abroad. Solo exhibitions were held at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreeal, the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec in Quebec City, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and in Almelo, Netherlands. In 1938, Fortin won the Jessie Dow prize from the Art Association of Montreal and, the following year, was awarded a bronze medal at the New York World’s Fair.

Sam Francis

Sam Francis

Sam Francis was an American painter and printmaker recognized as one of the most influential postwar American artists. He was born in 1923 in San Mateo, California and attended the University of California, Berkeley as a pre-med student. His studies were halted when he joined the Army Air Corps during World War II. Due to an illness caused by spinal tuberculosis, he left his military service and was hospitalized for extended periods of time over the next several years. It was confined to his hospital bed where he found his passion for painting.

After his recovery, he experimented with abstract and figurative works in the San Francisco area, inspired in part by the artistic trends dominating the 1940s – Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. He returned to Berkeley and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1949 and with a Master of Arts in 1950. After finishing his education, he moved to Paris where he worked throughout the 1950s while frequently travelling to the South of France, Mexico City, Tokyo, Bern, and New York. While in Paris, his style became associated with Tachisme, a French form of abstract painting with an intuitive form of expression. A Time Magazine feature in 1956 described Francis as one of the most popular American painters in Paris at the time.

Francis’ art has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work can be found in international museum collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York, NY, the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, France, and the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo, Japan. During his career, he had more than one hundred solo exhibitions and, since his death, over ninety more. Today, the Sam Francis Foundation in California continues to organize exhibitions as well as donate artworks, manage archives, and provide education to the public about his art to preserve Francis’ legacy.

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was an artist working in the mid 20th century whose impact on artworld has been momentous. She made great contributions to the Abstract Expressionist movement and is praised for working as a woman in a predominantly male profession. Most famously, Frankenthaler invented the soak-stain technique of painting which consists of pouring thin paint directly onto unprimed canvases. This technique allows the paint to pool and seep into different parts of the work. The end result are colourful and raw artworks evocative of natural phenomena. Her soak-stained technique was instrumental in the development of Color Field painting which was practiced by many of her contemporaries including Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. This painting style has continued to define mid-century American painting. 

 Frankenthaler was born in 1928 and raised in New York City. She graduated from Bennington College in 1949 and began her professional career a year later. Her painting, Beach (1950) was selected for the exhibition, Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery, which catapulted her career. She was the subject of major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Frankenthaler continued to reinvent the ways art is produced and experimented with a variety of mediums such as ceramics, sculpture, tapestry and print making, which she explored until her death in 2011. 

 Frankenthaler’s work is frequently re-examined throughout the artworld internationally. She is praised for her dynamism, her unique artistic methods and for her significance within feminism’s intersection with art history. Most recently, her work was presented in the MoMA’s exhibition, Making Space: Women and Artists and Abstraction (2017).

Yves Gaucher

Yves Gaucher

Yves Gaucher was a Canadian Abstract painter and printmaker who played an influential role in Quebec printmaking in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also a major contributor to the development of minimalism and hardedge painting.

Gaucher was born in Montreal in 1934 and attended Collège Brébeuf in Montreal in 1948. A year later, he studied at Sir George Williams College (today Concordia University). During his youth, he worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in the mailroom and, later in life, became a radio announcer with his own jazz program. He also played the trumpet and regularly performed gigs as a jazz musician.

After meeting Arthur Lismer, an artist of the Group of Seven, Gaucher decided to practice art more seriously. He studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montreal in 1954 but was expelled in 1956. From then on, he studied art on his own and took on freelance jobs. Years later, he returned to the École des beaux-arts and studied printmaking, creating his own technique of heavy embossing. His prints were technically innovative and represent his extensive career of experimentation.

His first exhibition was held at the Galerie d’Échange in 1957 after which he found much success in Montreal and throughout Canada. In 1962, he traveled to Europe to study art with a grant awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts. He was the founding president of the Associations des Peintures-Gravures de Montréal. In 1964, Gaucher began to focus on painting. The New York Modernist artists Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko majorly influence his work, evidenced in his use of geometric objects and flat colours on large canvases, emphasizing mathematical relationships, patterns, and spatial relationships.

Gaucher’s work, along with those of Alex Colville and Sorel Etrog, were chosen to represent Canada at the 1966 Venice Biennale. In the 1980s, he taught at Concordia University. In 1981, he was appointment as a member of the Order of Canada and became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. His work has been shown at many institutions including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the MoMA in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933. He is an African-American colour field painter and lyrical abstractionist artist.  He is associated with the Washington Colour School, a group of Washington, D.C. area artists that popularized a form of abstract art from colour field painting in the 1950s and 1960s.

Gilliam innovated the form of abstract expressionism by filling canvases with fields of saturated colour and layers of expressionistic brushstrokes. His work has been impacted by the free form structure of jazz music, citing Miles Davis and John Coltrane as influences.

One of the great innovators in post-war American painting, he often displays his paintings in atypical draping installations – taking the canvas off its stretcher and creating sculpture-painting hybrids. Recently, Gilliam has worked with aluminium, steel, and computer-generated imaging to produce textured paintings that incorporate metal forms.

In 2017, Gilliam participated in the Venice Biennale and in 2018 his work was exhibited at Art Basel. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Lincoln Center Editions, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). In 2022, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC will exhibit the first major retrospective of his work in nearly two decades.

Gilliam currently works in Washington, D.C.

Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb was a well-known modernist painter and sculptor. A New York School member and a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, his work is characterized by expressions of authentic feelings and human difficulties, such as evil, violence, war, and ignorance. Growing up during the Great Depression and the interwar period, his artistic practice responds to the hardships and complexities of life that he witnessed and lived through.

Gottlieb was born in New York’s East Village, to a family of Jewish Czech immigrants. In 1922, he studied at the Parsons School Of Design and Cooper Union. In 1935, Gottlieb along with fellow artist Mark Rothko became founding members of the New York painters group called “The Ten”, which protested the American Realism painting style. Gotlieb used a common motif in the form of a sun or orb, hovering above calligraphic marks. He was known for using universal visual symbols, positioning them as a parallel to written language.

Today, Gottlieb’s work can be found in art institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, among others.

Keith Haring

Keith Haring

Keith Haring was an American artist born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1958. In 1976, he began studying at a commercial art school in Pittsburgh. Upon realizing he had little interest in commercial art, he dropped out and moved to New York City to study at the School of Visual Arts. There, he participated in a thriving alternative art community that operated outside of the established galleries and museums alongside artists such as Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Haring’s career was devoted to creating public art with his ultimate goal being to create accessible art for everyone. He created hundreds of public drawings for the New York subway system, designed sets and backdrops for theaters and clubs, painted murals, and created advertising campaigns. Additionally, he opened his own retail store called Pop Shop, where he sold merchandise adorned with his imagery. His artistic expression of universal concepts such as love, sex, death, and war, along with his direct visual language, enabled a large and diverse audience to engage with his work and find meaning in it.

After Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, he used his art as a vehicle to spread awareness about the disease. He also established the Keith Haring Foundation, a non-for-profit organization with the mandate to provide help and support to children and organizations involved in research, education, and care related to AIDS. The Foundation also houses many of Haring’s artworks and archives to facilitate research.

During his brief career, before passing away at the age of 31, Haring’s work was exhibited in more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions. He collaborated with a diverse array of well-established artists and performers including Madonna, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Timothy Leary, Jenny Holzer, and Grace Jones. His work resides in many established collections including the MoMa and the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, and the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, among others.

Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris was a Canadian landscape painter recognized for his participation in the Group of Seven, the famous group of Canadian landscape painters of the 1920s and 1930s. His work redefined the history of Canadian art and contributed to its own distinct style with his innovative representations of the northern landscape.

He was born in Brantford, Ontario in 1885 to a family with wealth and status, which facilitated his pursuit of painting. He studied at the Central Technical School at St. Andrew’s College and, from the age of nineteen, studied in Berlin. After the formation of the Group of Seven, Harris financed the construction of the group’s studio building in Toronto, which also provided other artists space in which to work. Additionally, he financed trips for the Group of Seven to paint in the Algoma region, a district in North-western Ontario.

In the late 1910s, Harris painted colourful, descriptive motifs of urban life and the Algoma region. During the 1920s, his work evolved and became abstracted and simplified, particularly in his stark landscapes of the Canadian north. Over the decade, he took numerous sketching trips around Canada, looking for inspiration in places such as Jasper National Park, Banff National Park, Yoho National Park, and Mount Robson Provincial Park. In 1930, he traveled to the Arctic on a two-month trip with a supply ship, during which time he completed more than fifty sketches. In 1934, Harris lived in and painted in Hanover, New Hampshire, and in 1938, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he organized the Transcendental Painting Group – an organization of like-minded artists who worked with a spiritual form of abstraction. After Harris achieved fame locally and internationally, he ceased signing and dating his work in the hopes that his audience would judge his pieces solely on their artistic splendour and not on their notoriety for being associated with his name. 

In 1969, Harris was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. Today, his work hangs in many prestigious public collections throughout the country including, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal. In 2016, Steve Martin, the famed American actor and comedian, curated a travelling exhibition of Harris’ work entitled, The Idea of North, which voyaged to various institutions throughout Canada and the United States.

Jacob Hashimoto

Jacob Hashimoto

Jacob Hashimoto was born in Greeley, Colorado in 1973. He studied at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota until 1993 and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.


Hashimoto is known for creating three-dimensional structures that consist of thousands of miniature kite-like pieces of bamboo-stiffened rice paper, suspended with nylon fishing line. Drawing inspiration from his Japanese heritage, he redefines the art of Japanese screen painting by combining individual abstract elements together to create dynamic graphic imagery. Though video games, cosmology, and virtual environments also inspire his work, the artist remains rooted in traditional mediums of modernism, handcraft, and landscape-based abstraction.

Hashimoto has exhibited his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally and his work is included in many established public collections. Additionally, he has been commissioned to create several site-specific projects. His work is included in many established public collections He is represented by galleries in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Italy. He is currently based in New York and is actively represented by the Mary Boone Gallery in New York, NY, the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, IL, and Studio la Città in Verona, Italy.

Al Held

Al Held

Al Held was an American Abstract expressionist painter. Born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, Held joined the U.S. Navy in 1945. He showed little interest in art until after his service when he became inspired to enrol in the Arts Student League of New York with the help of a stipend from the G.I. Bill. From 1949 to 1952, Held lived in Paris to attend the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. During his studies, he discovered his distaste for realism and moved his artistic practice into the realm of abstraction. He drew inspiration from other Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem De Kooning.

Held moved back to New York and soon became a prominent figure in the second-generation Abstract Expressionists who were quickly gaining popularity at that time. In 1959, he received his first New York solo exhibition at the Poindexter Gallery, firmly establishing his artistic career in both America and Europe. Held was appointed to the Yale University Faculty of Art as an associate professor where he taught from 1962-1980. In 1966, he was awarded both the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Logan Medal of the Arts. In 1988, he was elected as an Associate member of the National Academy of Design and in 1994 he shifted his career to focus full-time on academia.

Although best known for his large-scale hard-edge paintings and as a renowned Abstract Expressionist, Held’s painting practice evolved through a multitude of styles over the years including Pop Art, Geometric Abstraction, and Post-Painterly Abstraction. He openly rejected art critic Clement Greenberg’s modernist doctrine that insisted on the flatness of the canvas.

His work was exhibited in a significant number of group and solo exhibitions among North America’s most prestigious art institutions and is currently part of numerous public collections such as the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, among many others. Today, the Al Held Foundation manages his legacy by offering education to both students and teachers about Held’s works and influence.