Jean Paul Lemieux

Jean Paul Lemieux

Jean-Paul Lemieux is one of the most well-known and illustrious Quebec painters of the twentieth century. He is remembered for his depictions of desolate, infinite landscapes and cities of the Quebec region in a renewed figurative style.

Lemieux was born in Quebec City in 1904. He studied under Edwin Holgate at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. There, he met Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean-Charles Faucher, and Louis Muhlstock. Like many of his comrades at this time, Lemieux joined in on the prevailing trend during the 1930s and 1940s in Quebec, that of the renewal of figurative art. In 1929, when the great depression hit, Lemieux made the move to Europe to study advertising and art in Paris where he met fellow French-Canadian artist, Clarence Gagnon.

Lemieux has received numerous awards and accolades for his contribution to Quebecois art. The artist’s work was one of a select few chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1960. In 1968, he became a Companion of the Order of Canada and was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy. He received the Molson Prize for the Canada Council of the Arts in 1974. In addition to painting, Lemieux illustrated several books including La Petite Poule d’eau by Gabrielle Roy in 1971 and Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon in 1981. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, and the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Quebec City.

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was an American pop artist famously known for his comic-inspired work which played a vital role in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.

Lichtenstein was born in Manhattan, New York in 1923. He left New York for Ohio State University to study Fine Arts, though his studies were interrupted for three years due to his Army enlistment in World War II. After the war, he finished his Bachelor’s degree and went on to obtain a Master of Fine Arts at Ohio State University. He was later hired by the university as an art instructor. 

After nearly a decade of working and living between Ohio and New York City, Lichtenstein moved to upstate New York where he adopted an art practice in reaction to the Abstract Expressionist style. Instead of painting abstract works devoid of subjects, Lichtenstein took his imagery directly from comic books and advertisements.

The 1960s marked the height of Lichtenstein’s international fame. He moved back to New York City and painted his most famous works including Drowning Girl (1963), painted from a story in DC Comic’s Secret Hearts #83. Many critics questioned Lichtenstein’s originality since his works were near replicas of existing comic book panels. He always stood by his work and legitimized it by claiming its ability to take low art and elevate it to a high art context.

In 1964, Lichtenstein was the first American to exhibit at the Tate. In the following years he exhibited at other institutions throughout Europe. During this period, Lichtenstein also reproduced masterpieces by Picasso, Cézanne and Mondrian, recreating them with his own unique, hard-edge style. Later in his career he also reproduced works by Van Gogh, as he was continually inspired by art history.

Lichtenstein worked on many commissions as well including a Pop Art bedroom suite at the Palace Hotel in St. Mortiz, a BMW Art Car, the DreamWorks Records logo as well as public works in Barcelona, New York and other cities throughout the United States. Today, his work can be found in the collections the of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the National Gallery of Australia. In 1999, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation was founded which holds hundreds of his works.

John Little

John Little

John Little is a Canadian artist celebrated for his unique paintings of urban scenes from his hometown of Montreal. He studied at the Musée des beaux-arts in Montreal under Arthur Lismer and Goodridge Roberts. Later on, Little studied at the Art Students League in New York. Upon his return to Montreal in 1951, he joined his father’s architecture firm and worked as a draftsman.

In 1953, Little began working as full-time artist, though his interest in architecture did carry through into his art practice. He primarily painted Montreal’s historic buildings and neighborhoods – which have since drastically changed – with the intention of preserving their integrity and history. He is especially known and celebrated for his skill in capturing winter light and cold atmospheres. 

Little’s work is part of collections at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick, and the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal. Little became an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1961 and a full member of the Academy in 1973.

Robert Longo

Robert Longo

Robert Longo is an American artist best known for his large-scale, realistic charcoal drawings imbued with political and societal themes. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and was raised in Long Island. In his youth, Longo was inspired to become involved in politics after the 1970 Kent State University Massacre, an event which prompted the protests against the US invasion of Cambodia. A deceased student in the massacre, who was pictured in a popular press photo, was a former classmate of Longo’s. Ever since, Longo’s work has been centered on political themes such as power, authority, and social injustice.

He began his studies at the University of North Texas. However right before completing his degree, he left to study in Florence, Italy. From 1973-1975, Longo studied Fine Arts at the State University College in Buffalo, New York. In 1977, along with his life-long friend Cindy Sherman, he moved to New York City to participate in the underground art scene. Throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Longo showed his work in numerous exhibitions and was involved in the underground culture of performances, alternative magazines, rock bands, and non-profit creative spaces. In 1986, he worked on commercial music videos and directed his first film.

His artworks are part of several important public collections such as the Guggenheim Museum, the MoMA, and the Jewish Museum in New York, NY, the Tate in London, England, and many more. Today, Longo lives and works in New York City.

Robert Mangold

Robert Mangold

Robert Mangold is an American minimalist painter, whose artistic representations of shapes and geometric objects unexpectedly derive from Abstract Expressionism. Mangold employs the characteristics of abstraction as a genesis, in the sense that his paintings contain abstract compositions as means to produce a contemplative response. Unlike typical abstract and expressionist art which emphasizes colour and gesture, however, Mangold’s minimalist pieces explore the weight of a work and use material as a means to dictate the aesthetic and feeling of a work by endowing either lightness or heaviness. 

 Mangold was born in 1937 and spent most of his childhood in New York State. He studied painting, sculpture and drawing at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and upon graduating in 1959, was awarded a fellowship at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art. The fellowship proved to be of great influence, as he continued to study at Yale to pursue his Master’s degree. After completing his formal education, he moved to New York City and was hired as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. During this time, he met a variety of other aspiring artists such as Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt. After several months, he was promoted to an assistant’s position in the museum’s library, and later, ended up having his own artwork being exhibited on the MoMA’s walls.

 Mangold’s first solo exhibition as a minimalist painter occurred in 1964. Since then, major exhibitions of his work have occurred at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the the Musée D’Orsay in Paris.

Jean McEwen

Jean McEwen

Jean McEwen is considered to be one of Canada’s most influential Abstract painters, more specifically, as a ‘lyrical abstractionist’. He was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1923. He started painting while studying pharmacology at the University of Montreal. He published poetry while at school, but his artistic style changed when he was introduced to a film about Paul Gauguin in 1946, after which he taught himself to paint in a Figurative style – all the while completing his program. His first solo exhibition at the Galerie Agnès Lefort, Montreal took place in 1951. In the same year, he traveled to Paris where he met a fellow Quebecois painter, Jean Paul Riopelle. He spent two years in Europe where he painted and exhibited alongside Riopelle and American artist, Sam Francis.

After returning to Montreal, he worked for a pharmaceutical company but continued to paint and participate in various solo and group exhibitions in Quebec, Ontario, and New York. In 1972, a retrospective of his work was held at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal entitled, McEwen 1953-1973. A second retrospective was held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal in 1987 entitled, Jean McEwen: Colour in Depth.

McEwen received many awards during his career including the Concours Artistique for the Province of Quebec in 1961, as well as an honourable mention during the Sondage 68 show at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1968. In 1977, he received the Victor Lynch-Staunton Scholarship from the Canada Council of the Arts and was also awarded the prestigious Paul-Émile Borduas Award by the Province of Quebec in 1998. His work is held in prestigious public collections, galleries, and institutions across the country.

David Milne

David Milne

David Milne was a Canadian painter, printmaker, and writer. His entire body of work predominantly focuses on Canadian landscapes, while his later pieces feature more whimsical subject matter. Milne is also credited, along with American painter Marsden Hartley, with bringing European Modernism to North America.

Milne was born in the small village of Burgoyne, Ontario, in 1882. At the age of twenty-one, he moved to New York City where he studied at the Arts Student League and exhibited his paintings for three years. During World War I, he was assigned the position of war artist. He created works capturing the battlefields in France and Belgium.

After the war, he briefly lived in New York before returning to Ontario in 1929 to focus on his painting. He worked predominately with oils but dabbled in watercolour and dry point printmaking. He created his own artistic style with inspiration from the European and American Modernists. He endowed simple subjects such as trees, flowers, and houses with majestic stature and dynamism. During his lifetime, the Group of Seven largely overshadowed his work. Today, however, he is considered one of Canada’s most important artists. Clement Greenberg described him as one of the greatest North American artists of his generation.

His works, along with those of Emily Carr, Goodridge Roberts, and Alfred Pellan, represented Canada at the 1952 Venice Biennale. The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa held a retrospective of his work in 1955 and a second was held at the Hart House, Toronto in 1962. An exhibition of his paintings was shown at the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (2005).

Guido Molinari

Guido Molinari

Guido Molinari was a Canadian artist celebrated for his vertical striped, hard-edged paintings of highly saturated colour that stimulated the eye’s instabilities of perception. From the 1950s onward, Molinari was a central figure in the Quebec and Canadian art scene, as well an important educator and writer.

Molinari was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1933. He began painting at the age of thirteen and after briefly studying design he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal and the School of Design at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. During his youth, the works of American artists, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock, inspired him.

Molinari’s paintings represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1968, where he won the David Bright Prize. He was awarded many other notable accolades during his career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967. He was appointed as an officer of the Order of Canada in 1971 and as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. During his lifetime, Molinari was also an avid art collector. He had an extensive collection featuring the works of Jasper Johns, John Cage, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian.

Molinari’s influence on the Canadian art scene penetrated the sphere of education as well. He worked at Sir George Williams University in Montreal (today Concordia University) for twenty-seven years and was part of a small group of artists who founded the school’s Faculty of Fine Arts. After his death, he was awarded a doctorate posthumously from Concordia University for his significant contributions to the university. 

Today, the Fondation Guido Molinari works to promote his work as well as the work of young emerging artists. His paintings can be found in the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in Quebec, the Fondation Guido Molinari in Montreal, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the MoMA in New York.

Henry Moore

Henry Moore

Sculptor Henry Moore is heralded as one of the most significant British artists of the twentieth-century. He is known for his semi-abstract bronze sculptures of human figures, typically in reclining positions. His forms, often suggestive of human bodies or landscapes, consist of hollow spaces and organic shapes. Moore’s work was instrumental to the introduction of Modernism in England and Europe.

Moore was born in Castleford, Yorkshire, England in 1898. In his youth, he was encouraged by his teachers to pursue a career in the arts but his education was put on hold when he served in the British Army during World War I. After an injury resulting from a gas attack at the Battle of Cambrai, he returned to England where he became a student at the Leeds School of Art and, later, he also attended the Royal College of Art in London.

During the 1930s, Moore’s reputation continued to grow but his career was, once again, put on hold due to war. During World War II he was recruited as an Official War Artist and produced his now famous drawings of people taking shelter in the London Underground during the Blitz. Afterwards, Moore was able to return to his sculptural practice and use the reputation he gained during the war to exhibit his work to a larger audience. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, he gained international success. In 1943, his first solo exhibition in the United States was held at the Buchholz Gallery in New York. His first major international retrospective was held at the MoMA in New York in 1946. In 1948, at the first Venice Biennale since the war, Moore was awarded the International Sculpture Prize. His sculptures were celebrated for representing optimism, humanist values, and an opposition to Fascism. Today, his works are part of numerous collections internationally and his public artworks are found around the world.

The Henry Moore Foundation, established in 1977 by the artist’s family, encourages a public appreciation for the arts and supports sculpture projects, exhibitions, and the preservation of Moore’s legacy. Although exceptionally wealthy during his life, Moore lived modestly and endowed most of his earnings to the foundation.

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell was an American painter and printmaker as well as a successful writer and editor. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1915. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and later went on to complete his post graduate work at both Harvard and Columbia University.

His first well-known art pieces were created during a trip to Mexico in 1941, where he created pen and ink drawings. They were abstract in nature and innovatively combined formal compositional elements with spontaneous invention. In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim gave him the opportunity to create work for a show alongside several European Modernist artists. Following the show’s success, Motherwell was invited to participate in many others and, ultimately, was offered a contract with art dealer Sam Kootz. His accomplishments throughout the decade landed him a place in the New York School; a group that included esteemed artists Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Motherwell was greatly impressed by both Surrealist painters and the Abstract Expressionist movement, both of which greatly influenced his practice. His signature style consisted of simple shapes and bold contrasts that create an active balance between moderate and strong gestural markings. He constructed a dialogue between the subdued and rebellious and between traditional and experimental art making.

Motherwell has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout his lifetime and his work is included in numerous private and public collections. His work is currently held in the prestigious collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the MoMA in New York, NY, as well as the Tate in London, England, among many others.  In 1981, Motherwell established the Dedalus Foundation with the primary intention to educate the public on Modern art by supporting research, education, and publications within the field.