glossary

A style that flourished in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, Abstract Expressionism is defined by its combination of formal abstraction and self-conscious expression. The term describes a wide variety of work; among the most famous Abstract Expressionists are Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning.

Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, and became a central figure in modern photography. Beginning as an assistant to Man Ray, she created portraits of the Parisian avant-garde in the 1920s and rescued French photographer Eugène Atget’s oeuvre. Returning to the U.S. in 1929, she achieved renown for documenting New York’s rapidly changing built environment throughout the 1930s.

An art historian and critic who was, from 1928 to 1943, the first professor of Fine Arts at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Abell was a proponent of cultural democracy and the founder of the Maritime Art Association, which supported art programming and exhibitions throughout the region. He was a founding executive of the Federation of Canadian Artists, and his work helped establish a critical discourse around Canadian art.

A style that flourished in New York in the 1940s and 1950s and is defined by its combination of formal abstraction and expression of the subconscious mind. The term describes a wide variety of work. Among the most famous Abstract Expressionists are Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning.

The first negative/positive photographic process, developed by British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s and patented in 1841. (It was also known as talbotype.) Sensitized paper is exposed to light in a camera, creating a latent image. The image is then chemically developed and fixed as a negative from which multiple positive prints can be made. Because of its reproducibility, the calotype provided the basis for more subsequent photographic processes than the daguerreotype did.

Founded in Toronto in 1904 as the Society of Graphic Art and chartered in 1933 as the Canadian Society of Graphic Art, the group was an organization of artists interested in printmaking, illustration, and drawing. From 1924 to 1963 it hosted annual exhibitions, producing The Canadian Graphic Art Year Book in 1931. Notable members included Bruno Bobak and Charles Comfort. Once among the largest artists’ organizations in Canada, the society disbanded in 1974.

A painter, muralist, draftsman, and engraver whose highly representational images verge on the surreal. Colville’s paintings typically depict everyday scenes of rural Canadian life imbued with an uneasy quality. Since his process was meticulous—the paint applied dot by dot—he produced only three or four paintings or serigraphs per year. (See Alex Colville: Life & Work by Ray Cronin.)

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Among the earliest type of photograph, the finely detailed daguerreotype image is formed on the mirrored surface of a sheet of silver-plated copper. The process is extremely complex and finicky, but these photographs were nonetheless phenomenally popular from the time of their invention, by Louis Daguerre in 1839, up until the 1850s.

French for “in the open air,” en plein air is used to describe the practice of painting or sketching outdoors to observe nature, and especially the changing effects of weather, atmosphere, and light.

A progressive and nationalistic school of landscape painting in Canada, the Group of Seven was active between 1920 (the year of the group’s first exhibition, at the Art Gallery of Toronto, now the Art Gallery of Ontario) and 1933. Founding members were the artists Franklin Carmichael, Lawren S. Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank H. Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and F.H. Varley.

A photomechanical process to reproduce photographs in print, developed in the mid- to late-1800s by inventors including Canadian William Leggo, as well as Charles-Guillaume Petit, Frederic Ives, and Georg Meisenbach. It involves using a screen to translate a photographic image into a pattern of dots. The process revolutionized the illustrated press as, for the first time, photographs could be reproduced on the same page as type. The first commercially printed halftone photograph was published in Canada: an image of Prince Arthur on the cover of the Canadian Illustrated News on October 30, 1869.

The eldest son of Lawren S. Harris of the Group of Seven, Lawren P. Harris was best known as a landscape and, later, abstract painter. As an official war artist during the Second World War he documented the Italian front. From 1946 to 1975 he was the director of the School of Fine and Applied Arts at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, where he worked to popularize modern art in the Maritimes.

Born in Boston, Winslow Homer is considered one of the great American painters and an expert chronicler of nineteenth-century life. He got his start as a commercial printmaker and illustrator and came to be widely revered for his muscular and expressive oil paintings of the sea, as well as his scenes of women and children. He also worked in watercolour.

Though he was a commercial illustrator in his early career, Hopper is widely and best known as a realist painter of American scenes, those that conveyed a palpable sense of solitude, even isolation, with motionless figures in indoor or outdoor settings. Among his most iconic works are Nighthawks, 1942, and Early Sunday Morning, 1930.

A nationalistic and Romantic school of landscape painting that arose informally in the mid-nineteenth century when increasing industry threatened to change the natural environment of the United States. The majority of Hudson River School painters were based in New York, often depicting the Catskill and Adirondack mountains. These painters embedded a sense of drama, the sublime, and the monumental into their portrayals of nature, transforming landscape into a symbol of the intangible sense of God’s creation. Thomas Cole and Asher Brown Durand were among the school’s leading members.

A major art museum located in Manhattan, New York City, considered to be one of the largest and most visited museums in North America. Colloquially referred to as “The Met,” the museum was founded in 1870 and holds a vast collection of over two million objects, including global artworks and artifacts dating from antiquity to contemporary times.

Established in 1880, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa holds the most extensive collection of Canadian art in the country, as well as works by prominent international artists. Spearheaded by the Marquis of Lorne (Canada's governor general from 1878 to 1883), the gallery was created to strengthen a specifically Canadian brand of artistic culture and identity and to build a national collection of art that would match the level of other British Empire institutions. Since 1988, the gallery has been located on Sussex Drive in a building designed by Moshe Safdie.

A movement of the late 1950s to early 1970s in Britain and the United States, Pop art adopted imagery from commercial design, television, and cinema. Pop art’s most recognized proponents are Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Primarily a watercolour painter, Pulford was an influential faculty member at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, from 1949 until 1980. Originally from Saskatoon, he began teaching after graduating with a BFA at Mount Allison, his classes focusing on drawing and technique. His students, among them Mary Pratt and Christopher Pratt, brought attention to realist art in the Maritimes.

An organization of professional artists and architects modelled after national academies long present in Europe, such as the Royal Academy of Arts in the U.K. (founded in 1768) and the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris (founded in 1648).

Now typically described as screen printing, serigraphy was advanced in 1940 by a group of American artists working in the silkscreen process who wished to distinguish their work from commercial prints made by the same method. To produce a screen print, a printmaker uses a squeegee to push ink through a screen made of very fine wire or fabric mesh, where a stencilled design has been blocked out using a substance or emulsion that prevents liquids from seeping through. The ink is therefore transferred to the substrate—such as canvas or paper—by passing through only the areas that remain permeable. Screen printing can be traced back to China, where it developed sometime during the ninth or tenth century; the technique became more popular throughout Europe and areas of the Western world towards the end of the eighteenth century.

An early twentieth-century literary and artistic movement that began in Paris, Surrealism aimed to express the workings of the unconscious, free of convention and reason, and was characterized by fantastic images and incongruous juxtapositions. The movement spread globally, influencing visual art as well as film, theatre, and music. Leading proponents include artists Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Man Ray.

Along with Lyrical Abstraction and Art Informel, Tachism refers to an art movement of the 1950s considered the European counterpart of Abstract Expressionism. Strongest in France, it is also associated with Automatism (as practised by the Surrealists), for its emphasis on unplanned mark making, allowing imaginative expression to arise freely from the unconscious mind.