Autumn (Riviera Winter Colour Symphony)
39.5 x 47 in (100.3 x 119.4 cm) including frame
In the spring of 1954 Jock Macdonald was awarded a fellowship from the Royal Society of Canada to fund his painting and study in France for an academic year. That August, age 57, Macdonald and his wife Barbara sailed from New York to France where he worked in Vence and Nice. Autumn was painted there and is one of only a handful of canvases from this transformational episode. Particularly successful, it dazzles and echoes the brilliance of Macdonald’s watercolours done in France such as the Art Gallery of Ontario’s From a Riviera Window (1955). Its brilliant palette also carried on from Macdonald’s 1940s watercolours, and its paint handling extended recent technical developments.
Contemporary European abstraction aligned with his sensibility that favoured deliberate paintings made on an easel instead of the ‘big attack’ approach of the New York School. Macdonald’s Orange Impulse (1955, coll. Robert McLaughlin Gallery) suggests the linear plasticity of Serge Poliakoff while Autumn suggests the all-over lattice of early 1950s Jean Paul Riopelle without being pastiches. This European abstraction – Tachisme – could have been seen on Macdonald’s side trips to Paris and his first-hand encounters with Jean Dubuffet in Vence affected his approach.
Autumn is the fruit of mature experimentation. Painters Eleven’s first eponymous exhibition was in 1954, and we see Macdonald devising his grammar and vocabulary of abstraction the next year. Barely two years later he began redefining Canadian abstraction with his use of the industrial mediums Duco and Lucite 44 that allowed him to handle oil paint like watercolour. Given his advanced study and rapid development in France, he only painted one work with the nerve of Autumn. Its uniqueness within the œuvre and technique is clear, and its role on Macdonald’s path to the career-defining abstractions of the last four years of his life is unmistakable.
Thank you to Gregory Humeniuk, independent art historian, consultant and curator, for contributing the preceding essay.
Jock MacDonald
1897 - 1960 CGP, RCA
Born on May 31, 1897 in Thurso Scotland. A graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art, Macdonald emigrated to Canada in 1927 to become head of design and instructor in commercial advertising at the newly established Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design). Inspired by the natural environment, Macdonald and his colleague Frederick Varley, head of drawing, painting, and composition, spent much of their free time on weekends and summer vacations on sketching and camping trips in the Garibaldi Mountains.
When the Depression forced severe salary cuts in the art school budget, Macdonald and Varley decided to found the B.C. College of Art in premises on Georgia Street later occupied by Maynards Auctioneers. It quickly established a reputation as a centre of new and stimulating ideas in a variety of art forms including music, dance and photography as well as the visual arts. The school operated for two years before declaring bankruptcy, but its influence on the local cultural community of the period is now legendary. Macdonald himself was infected by the exciting ideas fostered at the College and he began experiments in abstraction. He soon found landscape painting in the tradition of his Group of Seven contemporaries too confining whereas abstraction opened up new vistas of expressive freedom.
During his twenty years in B.C. Macdonald was active as artist, teacher, exhibitor, and arts organizer. He was a member of the B.C. Society of Artists, with whom he exhibited regularly; a charter member of the Federation of Canadian Artists; and a member of the Vancouver Art Gallery Council for eleven years, serving on its judging, exhibitions and hanging committees, and implementing its popular Saturday morning classes. The Vancouver Art Gallery accorded Macdonald his first one man show in May 1941 and five years later mounted a solo exhibition, of his “automatic” watercolours. Macdonald moved to Toronto in 1947 and became instructor of painting at the Ontario College of Art.
In 1953 he was instrumental in the founding of Painters Eleven, a group dedicated to the promotion of abstract art. He wrote later: “In training young students I believe it absolutely necessary that the student be provided a program of study which forces him to observe nature very closely in many diverse directions. After some two years of such study I encourage the student to expand his inner self and begin to expand his personality. I am quite aware that the young student is often intuitively aware of his consciousness of the twentieth century and could create in modern ways but I believe that every student should, first of all, increase his vocabulary of form and colours by observing nature forms and be initiated into the laws of balance and dynamic equilibrium.”
Jock Macdonald died at the age of 63 on December 3, 1960.
