Celebrating how Alberta women shaped modernism
Obscurity gave women the freedom to explore modernist innovations
Nothing beats being escorted through an exhibition by the curator, the ultimate guide, brimming with anecdotes, ditties and passion.
I had the privilege of touring the Art Gallery of Alberta’s latest offering, Alberta Mistresses of the Modern:
1935-1975, with guest curator MaryBeth Laviolette. Laviolette is the author of three books on Alberta art and an arts journalist for newspapers and gallery publications, and her enthusiasm is captivating. I couldn’t have been in better hands to meet these 10 women, artists who helped develop the modernist movement and early abstraction in Alberta.
“The story of Alberta art in its early days tends to be described largely in terms of what the men were up to,” says Laviolette, “and I thought the broader story needed to talk also about what the woman were up to. The woman tended to be less tradition-bound, more progressive, often much more interested in what was going on internationally in modern art.”
One reason, she explains, was that college art instructors at that time were men, and their work was often more conservative and traditional.
“I wanted to share this idea that the roots of Alberta art were actually a lot more modernist than they have been described. These woman were the modernists.”
All 10 were born by the end of 1918 and the work — 80 paintings, prints and ceramics from 15 private and public collections — was produced between 1935 and 1975.
Though not all worked as abstract artists, Laviolette says those who worked representationally — Margaret Shelton or Annora Brown — used modern-art language, with bolder colour and flattened spaces, and focused on making an image that expressed themselves and captured a feeling rather than rendering a scene exactly.
Laviolette notes they often chose local subject matter, as opposed to the landscapes typical of the Group of Seven, which they absorbed and expressed in unique ways. Basement
Clutter, an exquisite watercolour by Laura Evans Reid, a Vegreville artist who started painting at the age of 52, is an example.
Annora Brown was criticized for painting Fort Macleod’s “ugly” grain elevators and told that if she wanted to paint something “grand and meaningful” she had to go to Europe. The thinking was that great art was made elsewhere.
I suggest that perhaps these women were more daring and pushed forward more boldly because they were invisible and had nothing to lose. Laviolette nods, adding: “No one would notice, so nothing was at risk.
“To be an artist with a serious practice, you would have been a male,” she adds.
That is one reason Laviolette used “mistresses” in the exhibition title. Mistresses once denoted a woman in charge, as in the mistress of the household. “To be a ‘ master in painting’ or ‘masterful in your craft’ always implied you were a male,” she adds.
As we enter the gallery, one quickly grasps this isn’t the case. The diversity of medium and range of style is startling, as is the quality. I am hit with the notion that if these woman thought it, they tried it.
Janet Mitchell, best known for floating and dreamlike images influenced by Paul Klee and Marc Chagall, opens the show, followed by Marion Nicoll, one of the few female artists mentioned in art-history books as a Canadian abstractionist. Using both geometric and organic shapes in her work, Nicoll described herself as a painter of weather and landscape. When arthritis crippled her hands in 1971 she was forced to quit painting, but continued to make art with clay and cardboard prints.
Edmonton artist Thelma Manarey’s lithograph, a cubist Mother and
Child, is stunning, as are the fingerpainted works of Dorothy Henzell Willis, one of this city’s best-known artists from the 1920s to1946, but now forgotten. Avant-garde ceramic vessels made with local clays by Sibyl Budde Laubental are functional, as the era dictated. The blue tea set is still used by the private collector.
Annora Brown studied at the Ontario College of Art in the 1920s under two Group of Seven artists. She captured teepees, fields and grain elevators in a very modern, interpretive fashion and was widely known for her paintings of wildflowers.
Margaret Shelton created 174 lino and woodcut editions, earning her place as an important Canadian printmaker. She explored many themes, including working class issues.
Ella May Walker depicted the history of Edmonton from fur-trading days to an image of the airport, while Helen Stadelbauer’s interest was in geometry and colour. Stadelbauer’s
Breaking the Atom (1946) is the earliest surviving piece of abstraction in Alberta. In 1949, she was one of the first Alberta artists to earn a master’s degree in art after her studies at Columbia University.
What a supreme delight to discover these Alberta gems — and a shock to realize most of us will be learning about them for the first time.