Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: Discover Montreal in the ’20s

Randolph S. Hewton (1888-1960)
Carmencita; 1922 ou avant; Huile sur toile; 63,5 x 66 cm; Collection particulière (Photo Craig Boyko)
Randolph S. Hewton (1888-1960)
Carmencita; 1922 or earlier; Oil on canvas; 63.5 x 66 cm ; Private collection (Photo Craig Boyko)

The Montreal Museum of Fine arts presents Colours of Jazz, until January 31, 2016, featuring works by the Beaver Hall Group. These Canadian female painters  met in the late 1910s while studying art at a school run by the Art Association of Montreal and continued their informal association into the early 1960s. They painted a variety of subjects, including portraits, landscapes, urban scenes and still lifes, in a combination of Modernist and traditional styles. Many of the artists from the Beaver Hall Group exhibited with the all-male Group of Seven internationally.

This exhibition sheds new light on the association of artists whose works imbued artistic life in 1920s Montreal and Canada with a certain colour: it offered one the most original expressions of pictorial modernism in the country. In a sense, these artists were to Montreal what the Group of Seven was to Toronto. But rather than offering an image of Canada’s identity through the depiction of untamed landscapes, they showed their attachment – and applied a modern touch – to the portrait and to humanized cityscapes and landscapes.

Info: http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/

Randolph S. Hewton (1888-1960)
Mlle Mary Macintosh; 1924 ou avant; Huile sur toile; 101,6 x 86,3 cm; Peter Dobell (Photo David Barbour)
Randolph S. Hewton (1888-1960)
Miss Mary Macintosh; 1924 or earlier; Oil on canvas; 101.6 x 86.3 cm; Peter Dobell (Photo David Barbour)