Art and social progress, the Toronto community of painters, 1933-1950

grantor: University of TorontoArt and Social Progress: The Toronto community of Painters, 1933-1950 revises appreciation for the post-Group of Seven generation of painters in Toronto whose two-decade leadership of a socially-conscious modernist movement of painting has been overlooked in histories of Canadian art. No manifesto or defined membership provides ready definition of this generation's collective effort during two decades of economic and political crisis to advance an art for society's sake in representational painting. The existence of the Toronto community of painters is posited on the evidence of a self-conscious reworking of motifs and compositions drawn from images of the land as it was lived in and worked by the Canadian people. Bertram Brooker, Charles Comfort, Carl Schaefer, Pegi Nicol MacLeod and Paraskeva Clark emerged as the key players in the evolution of this visual exchange with the formation, in 1933, of the Toronto-based Canadian Group of Painters. By the end of the Depression decade, Fred Hagan, Jack Bush, Aba Bayefsky, and Jack Nichols embraced the collective language. A shared belief in the social value of art for individual and communal well-being lay at the root of this exchange and the accompanying shift away from the Group of Seven's nationalistic landscape aesthetic to a new humanist aesthetic in modern Canadian painting. The socially-conscious artist in Toronto, like the social democratic reformer, defined humanist values according to the principles of order, balance and harmony established in antiquity as the building blocks of western civilization. The Toronto painters expressed these values at the level of design, presented by Canadian-based philosopher of aesthetics Walter Abell as the fundamental human principle of order and pattern made manifest by the abstract elements of composition. The Toronto community of painters' efforts to position themselves as guides to social progress faltered in the post-war years with widespread suspicion not only of the communist denominators of humanist values, but of an art that approached propagandist social communication. The result, ultimately, was the rise of abstraction as a language capable of circumventing partisan beliefs by restricting aesthetic experience to the materials of painterly expression.Ph.D