CANADIAN POST~WAR & CONTEMPORARY ART - Heffel

HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 37
26 JACK LEONARD SHADBOLT
BCSFA CGP CSPWC OC RCA 1909 ~ 1998
The Great Ones
oil and casein on board, signed and on verso
signed J.L. Shadbolt, 128 Monroe St., N.Y.C.,
titled, dated 1948 and inscribed oil on casein study
for large canvas, $250
24 x 35 1/2 in, 61 x 90.2 cm
PROVENANCE:
Claude Bouchard, Ottawa
Private Collection, Vancouver
LITERATURE:
Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt, 1990, page 57, this painting, as well as the
related watercolour, reproduced page 61
EXHIBITED:
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 67th Annual Spring Exhibition,
March 14 ~ April 9, 1950
Jack and Doris Shadbolt spent one year in New York City from September
1948 to August 1949. The year~long “sabbatical” was supported by the
Department of Veterans Affairs which, however, stipulated that Shadbolt
be enrolled in a program of study. He registered at the Art Students
League, where one of his instructors was Vaclav Vylacil, himself a former
student of Hans Hofmann. Vylacil’s circle included Arshile Gorky, who
had died by his own hand only weeks before the arrival of the Shadbolts.
Shadbolt also enrolled in a mythology course at the New School for Social
Research. In that course, where he made copious notes, the lecturers
emphasized the need to reintroduce myth to a culture of damaged
psyches.
The year 1948 ~ 1949 was a critical one for the emergence of the painters
who would be known as the New York School, roughly bracketed by the
death of Gorky and an important exhibition at Samuel M. Kootz Gallery
in September 1949 that helped define the new movement. But at the time,
artists like Karl Knaths and Felix Ruvolo were better known than Jackson
Pollock or Barnett Newman. Although Shadbolt did see and review
Pollock’s first exhibition at Betty Parsons’ Gallery, he was less than
enthusiastic about the drip paintings. As it was for Vylacil and many
others, Shadbolt’s ideal remained Picasso. He had seen the model
painting for the reigning mode of biomorphic abstraction, Picasso’s
Guernica, when it was first shown at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. For
many artists, Guernica exemplified the possibility of social engagement
in contemporary art. Drawing on so~called primitive art, Surrealism and
experiments in abstraction, the Picasso painting was seen as a way to
connect the crises of history to both eternal verities and new modern
experiences.
In the year before traveling to New York, Shadbolt had already turned
away from Social Realism. His great facilities as a draughtsman had made
him a celebrated artist in Canada, but in 1947 he began to experiment
with abstraction. It was primarily his experience in bombed and ruined
London after World War II, working in the War Artists Administration
where he processed the photographs coming in from Auschwitz, that
made him feel realism was not up to the task of expressing the spirit of the
times. Only abstraction could convey the kinds of anxieties brought on by
the war, the Holocaust and the dawning of the atomic age. Abstraction
had a transfiguring power and could “offer order to the spirit”. Shadbolt
called this “symbolic abstraction”. “Although it will sound fantastical to
many,” he wrote, “it could be maintained that this concept of symbolic
abstraction offers us a new dimension of form replete with the
psychological possibilities for a great human expression at the service
of large social themes.”
The Great Ones was painted in New York in 1948 as an allegorical
symbolic abstraction (a related 1948 watercolour depicts two of the
figures in the painting with a bluer palette). The title might make one
think of the victorious war leaders Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. Yet
their gender, more apparent in the oil painting than the watercolour, is
female. Two of the figures have dog~like heads. Shadbolt often used dogs
in his wartime paintings to represent sexuality on the one hand and
anxiety on the other. On verso is inscribed “oil on casein study for a large
canvas”. It is unlikely he ever executed the proposed larger work.
Shadbolt must have been pleased with The Great Ones, as he chose to
exhibit the work at the 67th Annual Spring Exhibition at the Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts in 1950.
Works such as The Great Ones mark the turning point in Shadbolt’s career,
and in the decade after his return from his encounter with the New York
scene, Shadbolt consolidated his reputation as one of Canada’s leading
abstract painters.
We thank Scott Watson, director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery,
University of British Columbia, for contributing the above essay.
ESTIMATE: $60,000 ~ 80,000