CANADIAN ART

By Macgregor

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0131130102
• ISBN13: 9780131130104
• Release Date: February 1987
• Publisher: Pearson Higher Education
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Hidden Heritage

I don't know if this book was originally written for primary school children or for adults, but at the end of each chapter there's a quiz asking questions like, "Why was the refus global movement important to Quebec artists in the 1950s?" In other words, these questions are pretty hard! Even after reading the whole chapter I still can't explain. There are also more complex questions such as, "Compare the work of William Kurelek, David Blackwood, and Joe Fafard. What do they have in common. How are they different?" I thought I knew a fair amount about Canadian art, but I would be hard put to answer this question. But I might as well give it a try. Joe Fafard must have been like the George Segal of Canada and his comical sculptures of ordinary Canadian people of Pense made him a big hit in the Western provinces. David Blackwood was an etcher whose childhood on board a frozen freighter gave him lots to think about and who learned etching from watching the complicated patterns of barnacles eating into the ship's thick, steel hull. Thus both artists take their lessons from the working class; and let me see, who was the third one? Oh, how could I forget, the late Joe Kurelek, who emerged from the Polish immigrant community of the prairies, and high school in Winnipeg, to lend a warm eye on the Polish people of his parents' generation. Looking at his work for very long you can't help but think of that hourlong wedding ceremony at the beginning of Michael Cimino's THE DEER HUNTER, a film made by artisans who clearly knew their Kurelek well. Because the book came out in the 1980s and took four people to write it, I wonder if some of them never read the chapters of the others. The book covers a vast array of Canadian art practice, from the churches of the earliest white settlers, to commercial art, to painting murals on the sides of buildings in Toronto's Berczy Park. A few artists, like Jean-Paul Riopelle, are household names the world over, but most of them, no.