glossary

A medium format film introduced by Kodak in 1901, to accompany their Brownie No. 2 camera. It was originally catered to amateur photographers and continues to be available for use today.

In 1951 the Indian Act of 1876 was revised in response to a growing awareness of human rights. The atrocities of the Second World War and the contribution of Indigenous soldiers in the Allied efforts against fascism provoked an examination of human conditions in the Canadian context. The 1951 amendments removed some of the oppressive sections of the Indian Act, allowing some Indigenous customs and cultural practices, such as the potlatch, to take place again. Regardless of these amendments, the Indian Act remained highly problematic, especially for Indigenous women, whose rights differed from those of men.

An acronym that stands for Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and additional terms used by people who identify with various sexual orientations and gender identities.

A not-for-profit, artist-run centre that emerged out of Toronto’s Nightingale Gallery in 1971. A Space was an important centre for the presentation and promotion of innovative art in all disciplines throughout the 1970s and remains a prominent venue for the exhibition of contemporary visual art. Its programming emphasizes inclusivity and political engagement.

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.

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.

Also called nonfigurative or nonrepresentational art, abstract art uses form, colour, line, and gestural marks in compositions that do not attempt to represent images of visible reality. Abstract art may interpret reality in an altered form or depart from it entirely.

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.

Closely associated with the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, absurdism, like existentialism, acknowledges an essentially meaningless universe in which humans struggle to create meaning. Unlike existentialism, absurdism does not depend on the acceptance of meaninglessness; instead, it offers that individuals might rebel against it by embracing the paradox of looking for answers to unanswerable questions, turning the search for meaning into an absurd quest.

Associated with the royal academies of art established in France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, the academic tradition emphasized drawing, painting, and sculpture in a style highly influenced by ancient classical art. Subject matter for painting was hierarchically ranked, with history painting of religious, mythological, allegorical, and historical figures holding the position of greatest importance, followed, in order, by genre painting, portraiture, still lifes, and landscapes.

A style of painting and sculpture established during the Renaissance, academicism or academic art was favoured by the European teaching academies, which provided a way to professionalize artists who had previously been considered craftsmen or artisans. In official academies, often associated with a royal patron, artists acquired skills in painting or sculpture, creating work that fell into a hierarchy of five categories: history subjects at the top, followed by genre scenes, portraiture, genre scenes, still lifes, and finally landscapes. By the nineteenth century, academic art had come to be seen as conservative, and it and the academies were eventually superseded by a variety of avant-garde art movements.

Founded by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, the Académie Carmen was a private art school in Paris, France. The school was run by its namesake, Carmen Rossi, Whistler’s favourite model. Classes were open to women and men, though separated by gender, and focused on painting and drawing. The school operated from 1898 to 1901.

Founded in Paris in 1870 by the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi as an alternative to the conservative École des beaux-arts, the Académie Colarossi was one of the first French schools to accept woman students. Classes were segregated by gender but otherwise identical, with both men and women drawing from nude models. Notable students included Emily Carr, Camille Claudel, Paul Gauguin, and Amedeo Modigliani. The school closed in the 1930s.

An art school founded in Paris in 1904 by Spanish artist Claudio Castelucho (1870–1927) and jointly directed from 1909 by artists Martha Stettler (1870–1945), Alice Dannenberg (1861–1948), and Lucien Simon (1861–1945). The Académie offered lower fees than other Parisian art schools and promoted a teaching program that emphasized a non-academic, experimental, and modernist approach to painting and sculpture.

A private art school established by Rodolphe Julian in Paris in 1868. Among the many Canadian artists who studied there are Maurice Cullen, J.W. Morrice, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, A.Y. Jackson, and Clarence Gagnon.

Founded as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts by Maximilian I Joseph, king of Bavaria, in 1808, the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich has its roots in a drawing school established in the city in the late eighteenth century. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the academy became a major centre for painters trained in the Academic style, closely associated with the Munich School of influential German artists. It changed its name to its current version in 1956.

A New York City-born multidisciplinary artist whose practice spanned sculpture, performance, film, architecture, and installation art. His work often utilized transgressive and controversial acts and imagery to explore notions of private versus public space. He earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and taught at institutions such as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University), Cooper Union, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Yale University.

A textile, digital, and mixed-media artist who draws from Anishinaabeg traditional beadwork and salvaged electronic parts to explore where the past, present, and future converge for Indigenous peoples. Ace transforms technological waste into floral motifs as an act of cultural continuity and nationhood. In 2015 Ace received the K.M. Hunter Visual Arts Award.

Ansel Adams became the defining photographer of the American landscape in the twentieth century. His way of seeing the world was formed during a period spent living in California’s Yosemite National Park in his twenties. A conservationist and Sierra Club president, Adams produced high-contrast, sharply focused images that sought to capture a mystical experience of untouched wilderness. He published books on both conservation and photography, and promoted photography as a fine art, helping to found a curatorial department for photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. 

A Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist whose work explores the relationships between nature and technology and their impact on Indigenous identity. A graduate of Concordia University, Adams has exhibited internationally and published Perception: A Photo Series in 2019. From 2008 to 2009 she was director of the Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg.

A pioneer in the field of art therapy. A trained artist, Adamson lectured on art and facilitated artmaking sessions for psychiatric patients beginning after the Second World War. He became art director of the hospital in Netherne in 1948 and worked there for more than three decades until his retirement. His collection of patient artworks has travelled internationally.

A photographer, and one half of the photography team Hill and Adamson, in which Adamson’s role was largely that of technician. Known for pioneering artistic photographic portraiture and for early mastery of the calotype process, Hill and Adamson rank among the most important photographers of the nineteenth century.

A member of the Adaskin family (a distinguished Canadian family of artists and musicians), Murray Adaskin began his career as an orchestral and chamber musician before turning to composition. A prolific modernist composer, known for championing Canadian music and musicians, Adaskin was also an influential teacher.

The Advisory Arts Council was appointed in 1907 to administer grants to the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) and to advise the minister of public works (who oversaw the NGC at the time) on purchases or spending on any works of art, including monuments in Ottawa and elsewhere in Canada.

Active in Britain from 1860 to 1900, the Aesthetic movement rejected the idea that art must be grounded in a deeper meaning in favour of a focus on beauty, or “art for art’s sake.” Drawing on decorative and pictorial traditions from ancient Greece to the Renaissance and influenced by an influx of Japanese prints following the forced opening of trade in 1853, it blurred the line between decorative and fine arts, particularly through the design work of William Morris. Other prominent figures included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde.

An abstract painter, spiritualist, and occultist, af Klint was the leader of The Five (De Fem), a group of Swedish female artists who believed their work to be dictated by spirits of a different realm. Her purely abstract paintings predate those by Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. Af Klint stipulated that her work not be displayed until twenty years after her death; it was first shown publicly in Los Angeles in 1986.

A term that refers to an optical illusion whereby an image remains visible even after its source is no longer present. An example of a common afterimage is the glow that appears in one’s vision following exposure to a bright light.

A largely self-taught photographer whose work explores her identity as a lesbian Chicana woman. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Aguilar made powerful portraits of herself nude in various settings, from natural landscapes to interior domestic spaces. During this period, she also began taking portraits of other queer Chicana women in her community of East Los Angeles. Aguilar’s best-known work is Three Eagles Flying, 1990, a self-portrait articulating the complexities of her bicultural identity.

As a young man Aitken studied art in Dublin and travelled in Europe and North America before establishing himself as a painter based in Glasgow. He became known for his landscapes, and he specialized in working in watercolour. A friend of William Van Horne, he was one of several artists who painted landscapes for the Canadian Pacific Railway.

An artist known for her bold drawings, Saimaiyu Akesuk often represents bears and birds in her work. Prints based on her drawings have been released in Kinngait Studios’ Annual Print Collection, including in 2013, 2014, and 2015.

A painter and designer who studied and later taught at the Bauhaus, Albers immigrated to the United States after the Nazis closed the school in 1933. As a teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he attracted future luminaries such as Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. Albers was a pioneer of Op art and Kinetic art.

Founded in 1931 by A.C. Leighton and other Calgary artists, the ASA serves to promote the visual arts in Alberta through its membership, exhibitions, and education programs. Prominent artists from the province have acted as presidents of the Society, including Leighton, H.G. Glyde, Illingworth Kerr, and Stanford Perrott. The ASA grants scholarships to post-secondary and graduate students in the visual arts and runs the TREX program, which circulates art exhibitions around communities in Southwestern Alberta.

The author of treatises on painting, sculpture, and architecture—together, these three texts serve as the theoretical basis for all of Renaissance art—Alberti is credited with standardizing the forms of classical design.

A Chicago painter of haunting and meticulously constructed portraits and still lifes. His most famous works—among them his earliest monumental painting, Into the World There Came a Soul Named Ida, 1929–30—convey his lifelong concern with the idea of mortality. Albright also wrote and worked in sculpture, lithography, and film.

A coating consisting of a combination of egg whites and salt, applied to glass (for photographic negatives) or, more commonly, paper (for photographic prints), and then sensitized with a silver nitrate solution. Albumen prints were common from the 1850s to the 1890s and were preferred to salt prints for their clarity.

An official war artist with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, Aldwinckle produced over 100 drawings and paintings depicting his experiences. A prominent graphic designer and teacher, he later was principal of the Ontario College of Art and Design (now OCAD University).

A landscape painter known for his colourful and gestural depictions of natural water reflections and rugged territories in Canada, the United States, and Iceland. In 2011 Alexander taught at the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop in Saskatchewan. His works are found in many private and public collections, including Museum London, Ontario, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

A Victoria-born photographer and multidisciplinary artist whose work is associated with Vancouver photo-conceptualism, the Pictures Generation, and appropriation art. Alexander studied at NSCAD University in Halifax and exhibited in New York in the 1980s. Her introspective approach to photography explores the tensions between nature and culture.

A Tsimshian artist who produced carvings, paintings, and lanternslide illustrations of life in his community of Lax Kw’alaams (Fort/Port Simpson) on the coast of northern British Columbia, Alexcee sold his works to European settlers. He was also trained as a halaayt carver and created objects such as nax nox (spirit) carvings for use in Tsimshian shamanic practices.

An early twentieth-century group of Canadian landscape painters, including Franklin Carmichael, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson, and F.H. Varley. Most went on to form the Group of Seven. They met regularly and were interested in developing a unique art form inspired by the Canadian wilderness.

A painter and the wife of the miniaturist William Berczy, Jeanne-Charlotte Allamand-Berczy came to Canada as a leader of a group of German immigrants, settling in Markham, Ontario, before moving to Montreal. A selection of her letters to her husband forms an important document of life in North America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

An innovative and cerebral painter who engaged with numerous major styles throughout his life, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Alleyn trained at the École des beaux-arts de Québec, in Quebec City (now part of Université Laval), with Jean Paul Lemieux before moving to Paris in 1955, where he lived for fifteen years. He represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1960.

Credited with coining the term “Pop art,” Lawrence Alloway was a curator and art critic. Though he began his career in England, Alloway gained prominence as a critical voice in the New York art scene of the 1960s. As a writer and editor at publications including ArtForum, he detailed the relationship between various art movements and their wider cultural context, creating a form of criticism that rejected value judgement in favour of information. Alloway served as curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City from 1962 to 1966.

Following an apprenticeship in architectural ornamentation, the sculptor Walter Seymour Allward worked on a large scale, creating historic monuments and memorials for sites in Toronto, Ottawa, and throughout southern Ontario that include Queen’s Park and Parliament Hill. Allward is best known for his monumental Canadian National Vimy Memorial (1921–36) in Vimy, France, which commemorates both the First World War Battle of Vimy Ridge and the Canadians who died in France during the conflict that have no known grave. (See Walter S. Allward: Life & Work by Philip Dombwosky)

A photographic process consisting of a collodion positive on glass backed by an opaque material and held in a hinged case. Ambrotypes largely replaced daguerreotypes (with which they are easily confused) in the late 1850s and were themselves replaced in the 1860s by cheaper tintypes and cartes-de-visite.

A painting style that emerged in America in the mid-nineteenth century. Much like the French Impressionist movement it drew inspiration from, American Impressionism was characterized by the use of loose, textured brushstrokes and bright, vibrant colour schemes to capture scenes of everyday urban, domestic, and rural life.

An art movement popular from the 1920s to 1950s. Based in the American heartland, its adherents created pastoral scenes that venerated a pre-industrial United States, inspired by their rural and small-town surroundings. Among the most celebrated American Regionalists are the painters John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton.

A movement composed of smaller movements, including Regionalism and Precisionism, that developed in the United States from the late 1920s to the 1940s. American Scene painters, including Edward Hopper and Grant Wood, rejected European modernist aesthetics in favour of specifically American subject matter, which they portrayed in a realist style that had emerged with the earlier Ashcan School.

Born in London, England, Amess immigrated to Canada’s West Coast as a young child. A painter, he was part of the first graduating class from the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts in 1929 and taught at the renamed Vancouver School of Art, where, in 1943, he founded the Art in Living Group with fellow faculty member B.C. Binning. Amess served as director of the Vancouver School of Art from 1952 to 1970.

A pioneering figure in American Conceptual and Minimal art, aligned with Carl Andre, John Cage, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Serra. Anastasi was one of the first modern artists to create site-specific works; Six Sites, 1966–67, led the way for later artists and curators interested in this form.

The detailed visual rendering of the human (or animal) body for medical and scientific purposes or for artistic training. Focused on the internal structure and organization of the body, anatomical drawing permits the artist to understand the workings of muscles, bones, and other bodily systems to better create realistic figurative art.

An article written by Jay Hambidge and Gove Hambidge, published in Century Magazine in 1914. The authors refer to examples of antique art and also to more recent art and design that they believed were precedents for Cubism and argue that the method of blocking out was not new.

An Illinois-born multidisciplinary artist and composer whose work often combines performance, installation, and music. Trained as a violinist, she studied art history at Barnard College and obtained her MFA in sculpture from Columbia University. She is known for inventing and designing several experimental and non-conventional musical instruments.

A film director, producer, and screenwriter whose quirky “serious” comedies regularly earn him major critical and commercial success. Rushmore (1998) and Moonrise Kingdom (2012) exemplify his distinctive approach to storytelling and visual style. He works repeatedly with the same actors.

Carl Andre is a minimalist sculptor and poet who lives and works in New York City. His work, which has been influenced by artists Constantin Brâncuși and Frank Stella, consists of repetitive, grid patterns of blocks, bricks, and metal plates arranged on the floor or ground. Each piece is concerned with the physical realities of the space that surrounds it, and with how the viewer perceives it rather than with questions of symbolic or metaphorical meaning. Andre retreated from the public art world after he was tried and acquitted of second-degree murder in the death of his wife, the artist Ana Mendieta, in 1985.

A Toronto-based artist working with photography, video, and audio. Angelucci’s practice investigates the commemorative function of vernacular photographs and films, as well as their role in constructing narratives and histories. Initially drawing from her family’s archives, Angelucci has turned her attention to working with found materials. Her recent work explores the relationship between photography and natural science.

A celebrated and controversial underground filmmaker who made his first film, the often-banned Fireworks, at age fifteen. His films and books demonstrate a lifelong fascination with the occult and the scandals of Old Hollywood. Anger’s influence has been wide-ranging, from commercial and experimental filmmakers to artists working in other media.

Used to colour wood, fabric, and leather, aniline dyes are synthetic organic compounds known for their clarity of colour and for retaining the appearance of natural textures.

A collective term that means “the people” or “original people” and refers to a number of interconnected communities such as the Ojibway/Ojibwa/Ojibwé, Odawa, Chippewa, Saulteaux, Mississauga, Potawatomi, and others. In Canada, the Anishinaabe/Anishnabe region includes areas of Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec.

An American painter and prominent teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Thomas Pollock Anshutz was especially known for his portraits, though he also produced landscapes. Along with Thomas Eakins, he used photographs as observational tools both in his classes and in his own work, and was involved with Eadweard Muybridge’s movement studies and experiments with his zoopraxiscope.

A New York City centre for film study, preservation, and exhibition, with emphasis on independent and experimental works, started in 1969 by five avant-garde filmmakers and writers on cinema: Stan Brakhage, Jerome Hill, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas, and P. Adams Sitney.

The term applied to the current geological age in which human activity has had a profound effect on the earth and its ecosystems. The Anthropocene is understood by some to have begun in the 1800s with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Anthropogenic, or human-driven, climate change and global warming are hallmarks of the age.

Anthroposophy is a spiritual philosophy, developed by Rudolf Steiner at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It holds that the spiritual element in human beings can be experienced in concrete ways and subjected to scientific quantification. The curriculum of Waldorf schools around the world today is based on Steiner’s educational theories and anthroposophical philosophy. The pedagogy emphasizes the role of imagination in learning, striving to integrate holistically the intellectual, practical, and artistic development of the pupils.

A pioneering Conceptual and feminist artist working in performance, film, and installation. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Antin explored the construction of self-identity by developing different alter egos—including a king, a ballerina, and a nurse—that blurred the boundaries of gender, class, and racial identity. Since the early 2000s, her work has consisted of large-scale photographic tableaux that draw on Greek and Roman history and mythology to critique contemporary culture.

An abstract painter and sculptor, Karel Appel was involved with the Nederlandse Experimentele Groep (Dutch Experimental Group, 1948) and was a founder of CoBrA (1948–51), an influential group of young European artists active in the years following the Second World War and closely associated with its Amsterdam members. After moving to France in 1950, he showed widely in Europe and North America through the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. His work incorporates the intensity and affinity for l’art brut that emerged in CoBrA’s reaction against artistic convention.

An artist whose work in diverse media includes expressionist and primitivist paintings and assemblages, olive-wood sculptures, stained glass windows, poetry, and the set design for the choreographer Min Tanaka’s 1987 ballet Can We Dance a Landscape?

A term given to aesthetically pleasing commercial or utilitarian objects of everyday life. Historically considered a less refined category of art—and in opposition to “fine arts” such as painting and sculpture—applied arts are not restricted to a particular medium and can include industrial design, crafts, ceramic arts, and advertising.

An intaglio printing technique in which an engraved copperplate is immersed in an acid bath to create sunken areas that hold ink. A variation of etching, aquatints resemble watercolour drawings because of the possible tone gradations.

A Canadian journal of the nineteenth century out of Montreal, Arcadia was published twice a month from May 1892 to March 1893, in English, under the direction of Joseph Gould. The magazine declared itself “devoted to music, art and literature” and featured articles on events in Montreal and other Canadian cities, as well as abroad.

A term denoting an idyllic pastoral landscape or natural utopia. Arcadian landscapes can be traced to the Hellenistic period, and they feature perhaps most famously in Italian Renaissance and eighteenth-century French and British paintings. The word derives from the name of a Greek province that has existed since antiquity.

A significant figure in twentieth-century Canadian sculpture, whose numerous public commissions can be found in Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa. Archambault also contributed to the Canadian pavilions at the Brussels World’s Fair, 1958, and Expo 67, in Montreal. He was a signatory of the 1948 Prisme d’yeux manifesto.

A highly influential Cubist sculptor, introduced to the movement by Fernand Léger after moving from Moscow to Paris in 1908. Archipenko’s early work expresses the materiality of and contrast between positive and negative space; like Pablo Picasso, he created sculptural assemblages of found materials.

A master Japanese block cutter and printmaker who worked in collaboration with several Canadian artists, such as Mary Pratt and Takao Tanabe.

A sculptor and painter born Armand Fernandez in France, whose work became increasingly experimental over the course of his career. Arman was affiliated with the Nouveau réalisme movement of the 1960s, and he is best known for his “accumulations” of objects.

Born in Brampton, Ontario, Armington was a nurse and an artist known for her paintings and etchings of Paris. From 1905 to 1910, Armington and her artist husband, Frank Armington, pursued further training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Julian in Paris. During the First World War, Lord Beaverbrook commissioned Armington to create etchings for the Canadian War Memorials Fund. In 1939, Armington moved to New York, and remained there until her death later that year.

Presented in New York, Chicago, and Boston in 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, or the Armory Show, marked a seminal moment in the American modern art movement. Introducing progressive American artists and the European avant-garde for the first time to a wide U.S. audience, the exhibition featured the works of hundreds of artists, many of which were considered shocking at the time.

A Toronto-born landscape artist who settled in Montreal in 1942, Armstrong taught at the School of Art and Design of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He was part of an informal group of Montreal artists who shared his interest in Post-Impressionism and modern art, including Goodridge Roberts and John Lyman.

Germaine Arnaktauyok’s prints and drawings incorporate Inuit myths and traditional life, often featuring scenes of birth and motherhood. Occasionally autobiographical, her images have addressed her seven childhood years in residential schools. A graduate of the University of Manitoba (fine art) and of Algonquin College (commercial art), she is also a writer who has illustrated her own work. 
 

Born Hans Arp, Jean Arp was a Surrealist artist and original member of the Dada group. His work includes textile, wood relief, sculpture, and collage. Arp also wrote essays and poetry, contributing to publications including De Stijl and La Révolution surréaliste. In the 1930s, following his association with the Paris group Abstraction-Création, Arp’s work began to incorporate aspects of Constructivism, which translated into harder edges in his forms. His wife was the Surrealist artist Sophie Taeuber.

An institution founded in 1860 by Bishop Francis Fulford and a group of Montreal art collectors as an offshoot of the Montreal Society of Artists (itself dating to 1847). The Art Association of Montreal organized art shows throughout the city before establishing its permanent headquarters in downtown Montreal. In 1950, it was renamed the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, now one of the most visited art museums in Canada.

A decorative style of the early twentieth century, first exhibited in Paris in 1925 at the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. The style had several influences, including Egyptian and Asian motifs, modernist fine art movements, and its design predecessor, Art Nouveau.

Launched in 1897, the French magazine Art et décoration was the first magazine in the world focused on decoration. Originally subtitled Monthly Review of Modern Art, in its early years it defended new artistic styles, especially new art. Over time, Art et décoration tracked the evolution of modernism, especially after the magazine’s merger with the L’Architect in 1936. The magazine continues to appear monthly.

Art for art’s sake is a notion of art formed during the middle of the nineteenth century among a group of French poets called Parnasse. It is a rejection of Romanticism. First theorized by the writer Thêophile Gautier in the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), art for art’s sake is an art that only refers to itself and has no goal save for the pursuit of art and beauty.

Founded in 1924 as the Edmonton Museum of Arts by curator Maud Bowman (1877–1944) with the assistance of local art associations, the museum was renamed the Edmonton Art Gallery in 1956. The gallery held its exhibitions at various public venues throughout Edmonton during the first half of the twentieth century, before a permanent facility was established at Churchill Square in 1969. In 2005 the institution was again renamed the Art Gallery of Alberta. A redesigned and expanded building opened in 2010.

Opened in 1951, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) on Vancouver Island is the largest public art collection in British Columbia. With strengths in Canadian and Indigenous works, the gallery also holds a significant collection of Asian art. Its permanent displays include the work of Emily Carr, a celebrated artist from Victoria, and its gardens feature an authentic Japanese Shinto shrine.

The largest public art museum in southwestern Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH) was founded in 1914 and consists of a permanent collection of over 10,000 works by historical and contemporary Canadian and international artists. Occupying a 75,000-square-foot space on King Street, the AGH was redesigned by architect Bruce Kuwabara from 2003 to 2005.

One of the largest museums in Atlantic Canada, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia was founded in 1908. Its collection includes more than 17,000 works, with a focus on work by artists with strong connections to Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada as well as work by historical and contemporary Canadian artists more generally. Its collection of folk art, anchored by the work of Maud Lewis, is especially notable.

Founded in 1900 as the Art Museum of Toronto, and later named the Art Gallery of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is a major collecting institution, holding close to 95,000 works by Canadian and international artists. The AGO has undergone several expansions, including one completed in 2008 by architect Frank Gehry.

An art gallery in Windsor, Ontario, founded in 1943 and known since 2022 as Art Windsor-Essex. It holds significant works of art by regional and national artists, and exhibits both contemporary and historical Canadian art.

Thriving in Europe and the United States from the late nineteenth century until the First World War, this decorative style, characterized by flowing organic shapes and serpentine lines, had an impact on architecture and on graphic and decorative arts in particular, though its influence is also reflected in painting and sculpture.

A progressive art school established by artists for artists in 1875. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Art Students League was attracting many students who would become central figures in contemporary American art. Teachers included William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, and Robert Henri.

An Italian avant-garde art movement spanning the late 1960s to the early 1970s. The term “arte povera,” meaning “impoverished art,” was coined by critic Germano Celant in 1967. The movement embraced the use of found and humble materials, notably in sculptures, assemblages, and performance art. Arte Povera reacted against the commercial gallery world and American Minimalism by using natural and industrial materials. Major Arte Povera artists include Giovanni Anselmo, Giuseppe Penone, and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

A monthly magazine founded in San Francisco in 1962. It features essays, reviews, and discussions of contemporary art. Providing a platform for critical engagement with the art of the time, it seeks to bridge the gap between artists, critics, and the public. It is highly regarded for its scholarly texts, with notable contributors like Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss.

A work of art in book form, the artist or artist’s book uses the book as object as a medium for the expression of an artistic idea. While illustrated volumes have a long history, the concept of the book as a medium unto itself dates from the late nineteenth century. Whether as individual objects or editions, artist books have played a key role in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists, from Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover (1975) to Joyce Wieland’s True Patriot Love (1971), and Rodney Graham’s Dr. No (1991).

These are communities where artists congregate to live, work, collaborate, and critique each other’s work in an atmosphere of creative freedom. They were especially popular in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and on both the east and west coasts in the United States as artists moved from cities to rural villages during the summer months. A few artist colonies developed into permanent settlements where artists’ supplies were readily available and classes and instruction were offered.

A gallery or other art space developed and run by artists. In Canada these include YYZ and Art Metropole in Toronto, Forest City Gallery in London, Western Front in Vancouver, formerly Véhicule Art Inc. in Montreal, The Region Gallery in London, and Garret Gallery in Toronto. These not-for-profit organizations exist outside the commercial and institutional gallery system. They aim to support avant-grade practices and emerging artists, foster dialogue between creators, and cultivate the production and exhibition of new artworks.

A free-jazz group active in the 1960s and 1970s, consisting mostly of artists—who were largely self-taught musicians—associated with Abstract Expressionism. Founded in Toronto in 1962 by Dennis Burton and Richard Gorman, the AJB had a roster of players that over time included Graham Coughtry, Harvey Cowan, Terry Forster, Jim Jones, Nobuo Kubota, Robert Markle, Gerald McAdam, Gordon Rayner, Bill Smith, and Michael Snow.

The Artists’ Workshop was located in a coach house near Sherbourne and Bloor streets. First presided over by Barbara Wells, she was succeeded by John Sime, who folded it into the Three Schools of Art.

A precursor to modernist design, this decorative arts movement developed in the mid-nineteenth century in England in response to what its proponents saw as the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Spearheaded by William Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement valued craftsmanship and simplicity of form and frequently incorporated nature motifs in the design of ordinary objects.

A Toronto-based organization founded in 1903 by architect Eden Smith and artist Gustav Hahn to promote Arts and Crafts principles in Canadian design and architecture. The society organized exhibitions and fostered a community of craftspeople dedicated to traditional practices in early twentieth-century Canada.

The Arts and Crafts Society of Canada was founded in Toronto in 1903 by George Agnew Reid and a group of likeminded figures who included painter/designers Gustav Hahn and Mabel Cawthra Adamson and architect Eden Smith, among others. Its goal was to promote Arts and Crafts principles in design, decoration, and architecture. In 1904, the society held its inaugural exhibition, and the following year changed its name to Canadian Society of Applied Art.

A Toronto-based club established in 1908 to promote culture, the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto provided a space in which artists, architects, writers, musicians, and art patrons could practise and perform their art as well as engage in discussion in a convivial atmosphere. Founding members of the Group of Seven frequently met there to relax, exhibit, and promote their work. The club, which still operates today, was originally male-only; however, on February 19, 1985, female members began to be admitted.

Founded in 1912 by a group of successful artists, sculptors, architects, and writers of high social status and modelled on the English gentlemen’s clubs of London in the nineteenth century. Notable members were architect William Maxwell Sutherland (founder and first president); painter and respected art teacher William Brymner; Maurice Cullen; A.Y. Jackson; Henri Hébert; Alfred Laliberté; and James Wilson Morrice. In 1996 the membership was opened to women. The club is now a professional association representing a wide range of artists.

Asceticism is the practice of self-denial, often accompanied by a withdrawal from the world, generally in the hopes of attaining a spiritual ideal. This discipline has historically been an element of many varieties of religious practice. In philosophy, it is associated with various forms of disciplined practice, from the Sophists of Ancient Greece to the moral rigor of Immanuel Kant, the word itself deriving from the Greek askeo, to train. Ascetic practices may include, but are not limited to, fasting, restriction of movement, celibacy, limited social contact, and denial of physical and psychological forms of comfort.

A group of New York–based American painters—principally George Bellows, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John French Sloan—active from around 1908 to the First World War, interested in depicting scenes of daily urban life, including slum life and marginalized populations.

Most widely known for his carvings, Arnaqu Ashevak was also a printmaker and graphic artist. He was an adopted son of famed first-generation Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak and engraver and carver Johniebo Ashevak.

Born on southern Baffin Island, this graphic artist was the leading representative of Inuit art in Canada and internationally from the 1960s onward. The recipient of numerous commissions from federal and public institutions, including Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Canada Post, and VIA Rail, she created some of the most recognizable images of animal and human figures in Canadian art history.

A third-generation artist from Cape Dorset, Goota Ashoona is a carver of traditional Inuit whalebone and stone sculptures. In 2008 the family studio held the exhibition The Gift from Haida Gwaii, which included a two-metre-high piece collaboratively carved from a single whale’s rib.

A master carver of traditional Inuit sculpture, Kuiga Ashoona received the Order of Canada in 2000 and is among the most significant figures in contemporary northern art. A second-generation Inuit artist, he was one of Pitseolak Ashoona’s sons. A retrospective exhibition of his decades-long career was held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2010.

A graphic artist and master carver whose mother was the pioneering graphic artist Sheouak Parr. After the death of her husband, the carver Qaqaq Ashoona, Mayoreak Ashoona moved from their camp on southern Baffin Island to Cape Dorset. Her work has been exhibited in Germany and Japan, as well as across Canada.

A carver from Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, Napachie Ashoona is the son of the artists Sorosilutu and Kiugak Ashoona. His figurative sculptures are carved from serpentine, a stone indigenous to Baffin Island, and explore movement and traditional themes, including hunting, drum dancing, and familial bonds.

An acclaimed carver and expert hunter from Cape Dorset, Ohito Ashoona is the son of Qaqaq Ashoona. He began his artistic training at the age of twelve and in 2002 was awarded a National Aboriginal Achievement Award for his accomplishments in the visual arts.

A major figure in the history of Cape Dorset graphic art, Pitseolak Ashoona made well over eight thousand drawings during her twenty-five-year career. Beginning in 1960, her enormously popular, frequently autobiographical images were included in the Cape Dorset Annual Print Collection yearly. She bore seventeen children, and many became significant artists in their own right. (See Pitseolak Ashoona: Life & Work by Christine Lalonde.)

A hunter and trapper born in Ikirasak (formerly Ikerrasak), a camp on southern Baffin Island, who began carving in his mid-twenties, Qaqaq Ashoona carved his human and animal figures using only hand tools and notably worked in a local white marble. He was married to the artist Mayoreak Ashoona and was one of Pitseolak Ashoona’s sons.

A third-generation artist from Cape Dorset, Shuvinai Ashoona creates unconventional and imaginative graphic works that are widely collected and exhibited. Her work ranges from intensely coloured and intricate coloured-pencil drawings to boldly graphic stonecuts and monochromatic ink drawings of simple, isolated forms. (See Shuvinai Ashoona: Life & Work by Nancy G. Campbell.)

A prominent Cape Dorset artist who was encouraged as a young woman by her mother-in-law, Pitseolak Ashoona. Early on, Sorosilutu Ashoona was drawn to the colours that could be achieved through printmaking techniques. Her lithographs, stonecuts, and stencils often refer to Inuit stories familiar from her youth.

Known for her studies of Abstract Expressionism, Dore Ashton was a critic and art historian of the modernist New York artists of the post-Second World War era. Beginning as an art critic for the New York Times, she was an important advocate of the city’s abstract expressionist painters, a position that lead to her departure from the newspaper in 1960. As an art historian, Ashton published studies of both the individual artists Mark Rothko and Philip Guston, and of Abstract Expressionism in New York that defined the style as a school and movement representative of a significant generational shift in the history of art.

An assemblage, collage, or bricolage is a three-dimensional artwork created from found objects. The term “assemblage” was first used in the 1950s by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe his butterfly-wing collages; it was popularized in the United States in reference to the work of the American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine.

Founded by Louis Comfort Tiffany in partnership with Samuel Colman, Lockwood de Forest, and Candace Wheeler in 1879, the collaborative Louis C. Tiffany and Associated Artists was an interior design firm in New York City. The company’s projects were strongly influenced by the British Aesthetic movement.

Founded in Toronto in 1912 by George Agnew Reid and others, the Associated Watercolour Painters was one of many artists’ organizations and societies of the era. Although the group was short-lived, its members included artists such as F.M. Bell-Smith, Fred Brigden, and C.W. Jefferys.

A writer, professor, and book publisher, Howard Aster is, with Mike Walsh, a founder of Mosaic Press, which publishes non-fiction, fiction, and poetry by Canadian authors. He held a post in the political science department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, from 1970 until 2000.

Terms used in certain mystical traditions to refer to subtle, spiritual realms that correspond to yet are more refined than the physical realm.

Also referred to as astral projection, this is a mystic concept of shifting one’s consciousness to ever-higher planes of existence.

Founded in 1919 by Maurice Denis and Georges Desvallières, the Ateliers trained artists to produce religious decoration for churches—particularly those destroyed in the First World War. This Paris-based initiative helped to renew interest in Christian art in France.

A photographer best known for his images of Paris on the cusp of the modern era. His photographs of Parisian city streets, architecture, and landmarks were influential for avant-garde artists like the Surrealists who were interested in the creative potential of his documentary works.

Born in London, Ontario, and raised on the Prairies, this Canadian painter, printmaker, and commercial artist studied under Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald in Winnipeg and was also influenced by German Expressionism. As a commercial artist, Atkins worked alongside Bertram Brooker and Charles Comfort. From 1943 to 1945, he was the president of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour.

Realism was embraced by several important artists from Canada’s Atlantic Provinces in the mid- and late twentieth century, including Miller Brittain, Christopher Pratt, Mary Pratt, Alex Colville, and Tom Forrestall. It remains an important variety of Canadian art.

The effect by which more distant elements and objects appear to take on the colour of the atmosphere, decrease in saturation, and increase in brightness, appearing hazy and less distinct. In landscape painting, atmospheric or aerial perspective is often employed for dramatic effect: the background and more distant elements are rendered with less definition, creating depth and a sense of space in the image.

The first fully practical and widely successful process for colour photography, patented by the Lumière brothers in 1903 and commercially available by 1907. The autochrome process involved a single glass plate, which was treated with microscopic grains of dyed potato starch and then coated in a black and white panchromatic silver halide emulsion. Once the plate was exposed, a colour image with a distinctive granular texture would appear. The technique was popular for thirty years and was then replaced by roll film colour processes.

Refers to work produced through the technique of automatism, an art-making method associated with the modernist Surrealist movement in the early twentieth century. Influenced by Freudian theory, automatism seeks to prioritize the unconscious desires of the mind by suppressing purposeful or logical aesthetic choices and instead allowing the hand to write, draw, or paint the canvas in an uncontrolled, stream-of-thought manner.

A physiological term first applied to art by the Surrealists to refer to processes such as free association and spontaneous writing, drawing, and painting that allow access to the subconscious without the interference of planning or controlled thought. Leading proponents include artists André Masson, Hans Arp, and Joan Miró.

A Montreal-based artists’ group interested in Surrealism and the Surrealist technique of automatism. Centred on artist, teacher, and theorist Paul-Émile Borduas, the Automatistes exhibited regularly between 1946 and 1954, making Montreal a locus of mid-century avant-garde art. Members included Marcel Barbeau, Marcelle Ferron, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Jean Paul Riopelle, and Françoise Sullivan.

From the French for “vanguard” or “advance guard.” Avant-garde entered discussions about art in the early nineteenth-century work of the socialist thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, who believed that artists had a role to play in building a new society. The meaning of “avant-garde” has shifted over the years, referring to artists in relation to their times rather than to a particular group of artists working at a specific time in history. It connotes radicalism and rejection of the status quo and is often associated with work that is provocative and confrontational.

A highly influential photographer, he worked for major publications including Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, producing iconic portraits and fashion photography that made his career. Other notable projects include In the American West, a book of photographic portraits of cowboys, miners, and others from the western United States that achieved widespread critical acclaim.

Born in Paris to Russian-Jewish parents who had fled persecution in their home country, Claude Aveline is the pseudonym of Evgen or Eugène Avtsine. He adopted the name in his late teens and would publish under it throughout his life, with the exception of a period during the German occupation of France in the Second World War during which he used the pen name Minervois. A prolific author and active member of the French Resistance during the war, Aveline wrote poetry, novels, memoir, and essays, was cited as an influence by Albert Camus, and was an important figure in the literary culture of Paris in the twentieth century.

A Calgary-based multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, and photography, Averns has taught at the University of Calgary, worked in arts administration, and curated exhibitions for the Founders’ Gallery at the Military Museums in Calgary. Averns travelled to the Middle East as a participant in the Canadian Forces Artists Program in 2009.

A painter and installation artist known for creating works that decolonize Indigenous spirituality by reappropriating Catholic symbols and blending them with Atikamekw artistic traditions. Eruoma Awashish’s work explores her dual Atikamekw and Quebecois identity, addressing themes of hybridization, transformation, and grief as catalysts for personal and cultural renewal.

A Pennsylvania-born artist who established herself as an early proponent of the land art movement. Largely based in New York City, Aycock is best known for her large-scale public installations, in which she creates geometric shapes and overlapping forms using organic and industrial materials to explore metaphysical ideas, cybernetic concepts, and technological advancements.

A Toronto-based artist whose paintings—often based on photographs—express concerns about differing versions of reality and the sometimes frightening aspects of “normal” spaces. Since 1977 Ayearst’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Ontario, in Quebec, and internationally.

The non-Indigenous–operated B.C. Indian Arts and Welfare Society (BCIAWS) was formed in the late 1930s to protect and promote Native arts and crafts. Led by Victorian educator Alice Ravenhill, it involved church and residential school leaders, such as missionary/collector Reverend George H. Raley. BCIAWS awarded scholarships and held exhibitions to encourage young Native artists attending residential and day schools to develop Native arts and craft skills. These activities aimed to find ways for Native communities to make money and become self-sufficient within the economic structure of colonial society.

A Jewish artist and Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Bacon depicted his experiences in the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Gunskirchen concentration camps in ink drawings, which attempt to reconcile the artist with his traumatic history. Drawings of the gas chamber and crematoria at Auschwitz that he created following his liberation were used as evidence in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and 1962 in Jerusalem.

A painter, sculptor, architect, and civic official, François Baillairgé began his career in religious painting and sculpture after abandoning his studies in Paris. His practice includes original compositions and copies. He became an important architect, responsible for the planning and design of Quebec’s Palace of Justice (1799), the old Quebec Prison (1808–11, today the Morrin College building), and the old Trois-Rivières Prison (1816–22).

A California-based artist credited as one of the founders of Conceptual art. In the mid-1960s, Baldessari, then a painter, began incorporating photography and text into his work, and in the 1970s ventured into sculpture, installation, film, and printmaking. He often appropriated images and modified, erased, recombined, and placed them alongside text to transform their meaning, as well as to provide social commentary on contemporary culture. Baldessari is known for his photographic images overlaid with coloured dots.

An abstract painter, sculptor, and theorist, Joost Baljeu was also the editor for the international arts journal Structure, which was the touchstone text for artists interested in Concrete art. He is best known for his large painted geometric metal sculptures.

Primarily a painter and sculptor, Balla was a prominent member of the Italian Futurist movement, signing its second manifesto, on painting, in 1910 and exhibiting with the group in 1913. Interested in the nature of speed and movement and influenced by the motion photography of Étienne-Jules Marey, Balla’s paintings depicted what he called “dynamic sequences”: depictions of moving bodies that pushed their subjects into abstraction to capture motion.

A Paris-based ballet company formed by the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev in 1909. Part of France’s early twentieth-century avant-garde, Ballets Russes performed its first season in Paris; it later toured France and abroad, influencing a resurgent interest in ballet. Productions were treated as collaborations of artists from various disciplines. Georges Balanchine, Jean Cocteau, Michel Fokine, Joan Miró, Anna Pavlova, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky were among the many dancers, choreographers, painters, and composers associated with Ballets Russes, which disbanded in 1929.

Born Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, this self-taught painter, illustrator, and stage designer from a highly artistic family whose circle included writer Rainer Maria Rilke and artist Pierre Bonnard. Although precociously talented, Balthus was not widely appreciated until late in his career, perhaps because his classically inspired oeuvre appeared incongruent with the ethos of modernism, which dominated the fine arts of his era.

A row of balusters—short columns, typically decorative in design—supporting a rail to form an ornamental and/or protective barrier or parapet that follows the edge of an upper floor, terrace, balcony, bridge, etc.

An informal artist community whose members—including William Brymner, Maurice Cullen, and James Wilson Morrice, among others—shared a common interest in capturing the Canadian landscape, particularly the region around Beaupré, Quebec. The artists in the group often painted together and influenced each other’s work.

Established in 1933 as the Banff School of Drama, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is a post-secondary institution located in Banff National Park, Alberta. Founded by the University of Alberta, the Centre offers educational programs in the performing, literary, and visual arts. It is particularly well known for its artist residencies and practicum programs, having served as a site of artistic inspiration and creative practice for many Canadian artists since its founding.

An oil painter, watercolourist, and poet, Bannerman was one of the earliest North Americans to work in the Impressionist style. She became the first woman to be elected an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1882. At the Paris Salon in 1883, Bannerman contributed Le Jardin d’hiver, a rare early representation of Canadian subject matter to be shown at the exhibition. Later in life, the artist developed rheumatoid arthritis and turned her focus to poetry.

A New Brunswick-born artist and member of the American Barbizon School, a group of Realist painters who, like the French Barbizon school they drew inspiration from, focused on the depiction of rural scenes and pastoral landscapes. Bannister spent the majority of his life in New England, where he became an influential figure in the Boston abolitionist movement. He was a co-founder of the Providence Art Club and the Rhode Island School of Design.

A member of the Automatistes and a former student of its founder, Paul-Émile Borduas, at the École du meuble in Montreal. Barbeau alternated between a free approach in the Automatiste vein and painting in a hard-edge style with pure colour.

A pioneering anthropologist and ethnologist, Barbeau is considered the founder of folklore studies in Canada. Based at the National Museum of Canada, Ottawa, he studied French-Canadian and Indigenous communities, collecting songs, legends, and art, and documenting customs and social organization. His interests led him to work with several artists, including Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, and Jean Paul Lemieux.

From the 1830s to the 1870s, Barbizon (a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris) was a gathering place for French landscape painters who rejected the academic style in favour of realism. This informal group, later known as the Barbizon School, emphasized painting en plein air, in and directly from nature, setting the path for Impressionism. Major artists include Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Camille Corot.

Illustrator best known for his 1920s and 1930s advertisement work depicting conventionally beautiful and fashionable women, boldly coloured and outlined. His work was published in many popular periodicals; he designed the “Fisher Body Girl” for General Motors, Hollywood movie posters, and recruitment posters during the Second World War.

Born in Vancouver, Barkhouse is a sculptor and descendant of renowned Northwest Coast artists including Ellen Neel and Naka’pankam (Mungo Martin). She is currently based in Ontario. Wolves, coyotes, and owls frequently appear in her work as she grapples with the impact of colonialism and raises questions about rightful land stewardship. Barkhouse’s work is represented in Canada’s leading institutions and her many public art projects can be found across Ontario.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Barnard studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to France in 1883, where he attended the École des beaux-arts and was inspired by the work of Auguste Rodin. After he returned to the United States, he lived in New York City and he was celebrated for his sculptures for the Pennsylvania State Capitol.

A painter and printmaker known for his flattened, geometric, and semi-abstract approach to figurative art. Based in New York since the 1930s, Barnet worked at the Art Students League before later holding teaching positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His unique, experimental style of figuration inspired a generation of burgeoning modernist artists such as Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, and Marion Nicoll.

Born in Ontario, Barnsley grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. He travelled to Europe to continue his studies, enrolling at the Académie Julian and exhibiting at the Paris Salon. He later lived in Montreal, and he was known for his landscapes. He ceased painting in 1892 owing to health problems. 

The Baroque is a style of art popular during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries characterized by exaggerated movement, grandeur, and expression. Originating in Rome, it was the Catholic Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation, which privileged an austere spiritual engagement with the divine. In the Baroque, in contrast to Classicism, disorder replaces order and the effect is one of delusional grandeur.

A Structurist sculptor known for his wall-hanging reliefs and large-scale public sculptures. The Michigan-based artist spent his fifty-year career creating artworks that draw on mathematics to explore the structures underlying the natural world. Barr founded the Michigan Legacy Art Park, an outdoor sculpture park located near Thompsonville, Michigan, in 1995.

Barraud immigrated to Canada from England in 1913 as an established painter and graphic designer known for his drawings and etchings. He became an official Canadian war artist during the First World War after being injured while serving with the 43rd Battalion in 1916. A prominent teacher at the Winnipeg School of Art (now part of the University of Manitoba), Barraud taught etching to notable students such as Walter J. Phillips.

A major figure in twentieth-century intellectual history, Barthes was a semiotician, literary and social critic, philosopher, and essayist. Works such as Writing Degree Zero, 1953, and Mythologies, 1957, helped to usher in structuralism as a dominant theoretical framework, while Camera Lucida, 1980, his rumination on photography, remains one of the most influential books of photo theory ever written.

Known for designing the Statue of Liberty in New York, Bartholdi studied painting under Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) and sculpture under Antoine Étex (1808–1888) and Jean-François Soitoux (1824–1891). He became fascinated by monumental sculptures in the mid-1850s after seeing the Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

A British illustrator who travelled extensively in North America from the 1830s to 1850s, making landscape drawings for various illustrated volumes. Bartlett contributed 120 drawings to Canadian Scenery Illustrated (1842), a project of the eminent American writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis.

A composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist, Béla Bartók brought Hungarian folk influences to his classical compositions. Along with Zoltán Kodály, in the early years of the twentieth century he collected and transcribed traditional music throughout rural Hungary. His compositions made use of the dissonance and dynamic rhythms he discovered through his research and incorporated the influences of both nineteenth-century classical composers and twentieth-century modernists. Unable to remain in Hungary as Nazi power extended through Europe, Bartók immigrated to New York in 1940.

A type of sculpture in which the decorative motif projects slightly from the background plane. Bas-reliefs are common to exterior architectural design around the world.

A leading French Naturalist painter, Bastien-Lepage was especially known for his rural scenes and portraits of famous performers. He studied with Alexandre Cabanel at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris 1867 and was awarded the prestigious Legion of Honour in 1879 for his Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt.

An architect and artist whose expressionistic paintings are held at major institutions across Canada. As a soldier with the British Territorial Army during the Second World War, Bates was captured in France and spent five years in a POW camp. He recounted the experience in his book A Wilderness of Days (1978).

An artistic technique of wax-resist dyeing cloth to create decorative patterns, text, and designs. While the technique originated in Java, Indonesia, it is also popularly practiced in India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Central and Western Africa. Batik entails using a dye-resistant wax to draw designs on cloth. The cloth is then soaked in a single colour of dye. Next, the wax is removed with boiling water, and, if desired, the process is repeated with different colours in order to produce a pattern.

An influential poet and art critic who inspired the Symbolist movement and revelled in the sensual contradictions between the ruins of urban life and beauty, Baudelaire is perhaps best known for his 1857 poetry collection Les fleurs du mal, which explored taboos around bourgeois values. He is associated with philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin and the figures of the flâneur and the bohemian.

Open from 1919 to 1933 in Germany, the Bauhaus revolutionized twentieth-century visual arts education by integrating the fine arts, crafts, industrial design, and architecture. Teachers included Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and László Moholy-Nagy.

A conceptual installation artist, photographer, and filmmaker interested in the Western ethnographic tradition and how the colonialist perspective has been constructed. Baumgarten was criticized for his 1984–85 work Monument for the Native People of Ontario, which Saulteaux artist Robert Houle referred to as “romantic anthropology.” Baumgarten teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin.

A seminal figure in the history of Conceptual art in Canada. In 1966, he co-founded, with Ingrid Baxter, the N.E. Thing Co. Conceptual artists’ collective, and that same year launched the gallery and the visual arts program at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. His work typically incorporates photography, performance, and installations. In 2005, Iain Baxter changed his name to IAIN BAXTER& to reflect his non-authorial approach to art production.

Commissioned as an Official War Artist in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1944, Bayefsky was a painter and teacher at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. In 1945 he documented the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after its liberation. He remained committed to confronting anti-Semitism in his art for the remainder of his career and created a number of works exploring his own Jewish heritage. Bayefsky was awarded the Order of Canada in 1979.

Born in Russia and having emigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century, Baylinson was a Cubist painter in New York City in the 1910s and 1920s. His paintings became more representational after a studio fire destroyed most of his earlier work in 1931. From 1918 to 1934 he served as secretary of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, during which time he caused a public controversy over his decision to show the painting Father, Forgive Them for They Know Not What They Do, by Swiss artist Jean-François Kaufman, at a Society exhibition.

Refers to art and objects created or decorated with beads, commonly threaded together or sewn onto a surface as a form of embroidery. Beadwork is an ancient art form practiced by cultures around the world and is often used to decorate religious or ceremonial objects.

A Massachusetts-born photographer who emigrated to Manitoba in 1906 as one of the earliest Black settlers in the Swan River Valley. An engineer by trade, Beal taught himself photography and opened a studio, where he took portraits and images of life in his rural community from 1915 to 1925.

One of the first women to work as a photojournalist in the United States, Hamilton, Ontario-born Beals had a remarkable career producing portraits of celebrities, ethnographic portraits, and other photographs for a variety of newspapers and magazines. Later in life she established her own studio in Greenwich Village, New York.

A Montreal-born, Brooklyn-based artist working primarily with collage and mixed media. Bealy attended the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. A member of the artist-run gallery Véhicule Art, Bealy used the printing press there to publish his first art and literary magazine, Davinci. After moving to New York in 1975, he worked as an advertising art director and founded the interdisciplinary arts magazine Benzene, which ran through the 1980s.

A mixed-media artist who experimented with the photographic medium and spearheaded the reclamation of space by contemporary Indigenous artists in Canada. Beam often worked in photographic collage that featured family photos, text, drawings, and recurring images such as bird anatomy, Christian iconography, and famed freedom fighters. His painting The North American Iceberg, 1985, was the first work recognized as contemporary art by an Indigenous artist purchased by the National Gallery of Canada. In 2005 he received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts.

A prominent figurative and landscape artist and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Beament was an official Canadian war artist during the Second World War. During his tenure as a war artist, he depicted scenes based on his experiences as a naval commander in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, the English Channel, and Newfoundland waters.

A member of the Tobique First Nation and the Wabanaki language group of New Brunswick, Shirley Bear was a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and activist known for her gestural, painterly canvases that often drew on Wabanaki cultural history and symbolism. She has exhibited throughout Canada and the United States and was named to the Order of Canada in 2011, in recognition of her influential artistic career and her long-standing advocacy for Indigenous rights and representation.

A writer, draftsman, and illustrator, and a major figure in the late nineteenth-century movements of Art Nouveau and Symbolism. Beardsley produced a remarkable body of work in his short life; among his most famous drawings are those he made for Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894).

A painter known for employing a graphic style that incorporates flat areas of warm colour and for depicting Indigenous legends and spiritual and cosmological concepts in his work. A founding member of the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., Beardy spent most of the latter part of his career as an Aboriginal arts advisor and educator.

An influential painter and educator at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), Toronto, who sought to develop a uniquely Canadian style of painting. Beatty was a contemporary of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, though his painting style retained more traditional aesthetics than their work did. His most renowned painting, The Evening Cloud of the Northland, 1910, is held at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Primarily a portrait painter and an arts educator, Amélie Beaury-Saurel taught at and oversaw the Académie Julian in Paris after marrying her husband, founder Rodolphe Julian. She became the director after his death in 1907. Beaury-Saurel was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1923 for her dedication to arts education.

An architectural style that originated in Paris, France, in the nineteenth century. The beaux arts style takes its name from the city’s École des Beaux-Arts, where the style was developed and taught in the context of an academic approach to architecture. It draws on classical Greek and Roman influences but incorporates both modern materials such as glass and steel and elements borrowed from other historic styles. Beaux arts architecture, with its classical proportions and varied ornamentation, spread throughout Europe and North America to become one of the defining styles for public and institutional buildings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

An academic style taught by the École des beaux-arts in Paris to students in architecture, graphic arts, painting, and sculpture. Mainly based on the art of Greek and Roman antiquities, the style was especially popular during nineteenth century. In sculpture, the style initially favoured the idealized forms of neoclassicism but increasingly absorbed naturalism as the century progressed.

A group of approximately twenty-nine Montreal-based artists (1920–23), named after its headquarters on Montreal’s Beaver Hall Hill. Half of the group’s members and associates were women. Like the Group of Seven (founded just weeks earlier), the Beaver Hall Group promoted modernist art, but it went beyond landscapes to concentrate on urban and rural scenes, portraiture, and the human figure. Prominent adherents included Emily Coonan, Adrien and Henri Hébert, Prudence Heward, Edwin Holgate, Mabel May, Sarah Robertson, Albert Robinson, and Anne Savage.

A public art gallery located in Fredericton, New Brunswick, which opened in 1959 and is named after its original funder, the British publisher and media mogul William Maxwell Aitken (known as Lord Beaverbrook). With over 7,000 objects in its collection, it is best known for its extensive selection of British artworks dating from the Elizabethan to modern eras.

Born in New France, this mapmaker and draftsman was also an attorney of the King of France in the provost’s court in Quebec City. Among his contemporaries his drawing skills were renowned; his talent as an artist continues to be recognized by historians of New France.

A duo who focused on architectural photography in Europe and North America and were influential professors of The Düsseldorf School of Photography. They were particularly interested in documenting industrial architecture, and are well-known for their black and white aesthetic, conceptual approach to architectural photography, and grouping their photographs into grid formations.

A painter and leading figure of Photorealism. The stunning realism, seemingly benign subject matter (cars, houses, families), and haphazard composition of his paintings all indicate his use of photographic source material, an important part of his process since the 1960s. A major retrospective of his work was held at SFMOMA in 2005 and travelled to other major art institutions.

A painter, Clarice Beckett lived and worked in Melbourne, Australia. She was a student of the Tonalist painter Max Meldrum, and her work follows the mode he established, using tonal variation and layering to create atmosphere. Beckett is known for depicting scenes from her local environment, often in the early morning or evening light and cloaked in mist. Although overlooked during her lifetime, her work is now held in important Australian collections.

Working in both English and French, Beckett wrote novels, poetry, and essays before gaining renown with his play Waiting for Godot in 1953. His narratives, involving characters who suffer through extreme and absurd situations in which meaning is illusory, focus on a kind of elemental humanity stripped of the trappings of society. He is one of the primary authors of the French theatre of the absurd. Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

A painter and printmaker associated with Expressionism, although he rejected the movement. Beckmann’s work is characterized by raw, emotional complexity, bold colours, and often unsettling or violent imagery. His experiences of the First World War prompted him to explore the human condition and themes of suffering and turmoil in his art.

An artist, activist, and author known for her intricately patterned paintings that are inspired by floral motifs from traditional Métis beadwork. Belcourt’s paintings often feature bountiful and brightly coloured flowers, plants, and animals against a stark black ground. While celebrating the wonder and abundance of the natural world, Belcourt also directs our attention to the precarity of nature at this time of environmental crisis. She is the recipient of many prestigious honours including the Governor General’s Innovation Award (2016).

A six-storey building on Montreal’s Saint-Catherine Street that since the 1980s has housed numerous art galleries as well as artist workshops and dance studios. Built originally in 1912 to house a department store, it forms the largest concentration of contemporary art galleries in Canada.

A prolific watercolour and oil painter best known today for his landscapes and especially for his views of the Rocky and Selkirk mountain ranges. The English-born Bell-Smith studied art in London before immigrating in 1867 to Canada, where he worked and taught in Montreal, Hamilton, Toronto, and elsewhere in southern Ontario. He made his first visit to British Columbia in 1887 on free passes supplied by the Canadian Pacific Railway, and his intense engagement with the mountains would draw him back several times over the next three decades.

An art critic and member of the Bloomsbury Group, Bell was among the first to promote the French Post-Impressionists in England. With Roger Fry, he was a proponent of formalism and developed the idea of “significant form” as a property common to all works of art, distinct from beauty and necessary to arousing emotional responses in viewers. Bell was married to British painter Vanessa Stephen, sister of the writer Virginia Woolf.

An interior designer and painter, Bell was a member of the Bloomsbury group, a British avant-garde circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals. An early adopter in Britain of non-representational painting, Bell reverted to a more naturalistic style after the First World War.

A painter and printmaker best known for his painterly, textured canvases composed of overlapping geometric shapes and blended, bright colours. Bellefleur studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal and was highly influenced by the Surrealist and automatist experiments of his artist colleagues, who included figures such as Jean Benoît (1922–2010), Mimi Parent (1924–2005), and Alfred Pellan (1906–1988).

An obscure commercial photographer active in New Orleans in the 1910s, whose portraits of local prostitutes, taken on 8-by-10-inch glass plates, became famous after Lee Friedlander acquired the plates and reprinted them.

A painter and lithographer, famed student of Robert Henri, and co-organizer of the Armory Show. Bellows’s varied and prolific career—he quickly moved from portraits of child labourers to scenes of illegal boxing matches to seascapes—was cut short by his death from a ruptured appendix.

A sculptor and installation artist primarily working with stone carving and copper metalsmithing techniques to create forms that reflect on Indigenous and settler relationships to nature. In response to the treatment of nature as a commodity, Belmore depicts the environment’s understated actions: watersheds, changing shorelines, the weathering of stone, and the landscape’s experience of time. He is the recipient of several awards and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. 

Widely recognized for her contributions to Canadian art, Belmore is a prominent performance and installation artist known for her politically charged work addressing the unresolved issues of history, trauma, and identity in the colonial spaces of Canada and the Americas. Among her most recognized works is the performance video Vigil, 2002, which calls attention to the hundreds of Indigenous women gone missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. In 2005 Belmore became the first Indigenous woman to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale.

Born in Rimouski, Belzile trained as a painter in Toronto and Paris in the 1940s and 1950s. On returning to Quebec he became a founding member of the Plasticiens in 1955, working geometrically. Later he practised a more lyrical form of abstract art in contrast to that championed by the group.

A painter, printmaker, and educator best known for his Orientalist, historical, and portrait paintings in the French academic style of the nineteenth century. His works often featured exotic and idealized depictions of North Africa and the Middle East. Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant was a member of the Société nationale des beaux-arts and regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon.

An artist, writer, and activist from London, Ontario. Benner studied agricultural engineering at the University of Guelph, and food production and consumption are the consistent subjects of his artworks. His widely exhibited photographic, mixed media, and garden installations have been exhibited internationally and are held by major Canadian institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

A multidisciplinary Mi’kmaq artist born in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). His practice spans painting, sculpture, textile, installation, and film and often utilizes vibrant colours and patterns inspired by Mi’kmaq and Beothuk culture. He earned his BFA from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and his MFA from the University of British Columbia Okanagan, and he has been nominated four times for the Sobey Art Award.

Businessman Jules-Isaïe Benoît, dit Livernois, and his wife Élise L’Heureux opened their photography studio in Quebec City in 1853, achieving great success. Livernois also taught people about photography. After Livernois passed away, first L’Heureux and then their son Jules-Ernest Livernois continued the family business. Their photographs are held by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

A Quebec City–born artist best known for designing mechanical, biomorphic sculptures and costumes. He studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal alongside fellow Surrealist artist Mimi Parent (1924–2005), whom he later married in 1948. Benoît joined the Surrealists in 1959, who dubbed him “The Enchanter of Serpents” in reference to the serpentine shapes and forms that often characterized much of his work.

A painter, lithographer, and illustrator who believed strongly in art’s social function. Initially interested in abstraction, Benton soon rejected apolitical modernism, becoming a committed Regionalist and sought-after muralist. His monumental political narratives adorned numerous public and private buildings in his native Missouri, as well as in New York and Chicago.

Raised in Vienna, Berczy worked as a painter in Italy and England before travelling to Upper Canada in 1794. He became a popular portraitist in York (Toronto) and then in Montreal. Berczy’s most famous works include a full-length portrait of Joseph Brant, c.1807, and the group portrait The Woolsey Family, 1808–09.

Born in Germany, Bergman arrived in Canada in 1914. The following year he found success as a commercial wood- and photo-engraver for Brigdens of Winnipeg Limited, where he worked on the Eaton’s catalogue among other projects. His fine art prints depict mainly natural landscapes and plant studies in black and white, showing high contrasts and attention to detail. He served as president of the Manitoba Society of Artists.

A French philosopher interested in the differences between mechanical time and lived time (duré; in English, “duration”) and their ramifications for change, evolution, and consciousness. He is also well known for his theorization of multiplicity. An influential figure for late twentieth-century philosophers including Gilles Deleuze, Bergson won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was a sculptor and architect during the Baroque period. Beginning his career in Rome, he rejected the popular style of mannerism in favour of formal and conceptual freedom. He established himself quickly with highly original and complex individual sculptures, followed by architectural monuments that reveal his mastery of technique. His compositions adorn public fountains, and his monuments decorate the churches and royal chapels of Rome. As an architect, Bernini created total environments that include grand sculptural arrangements that fill the surrounding structure.

A nineteenth-century criminologist and anthropologist who is known for integrating photography into systems of policing. He created the first system of record-keeping to identify criminals, which combined taking measurements and photographing. He also introduced photography into forensics by using it to document crime scenes and evidence.

A prominent social reformer who was active with numerous causes from the 1870s through the 1920s, chiefly women’s and workers’ rights, women’s health, national education, and Indian independence. In 1893 Besant settled in India, where she established the Indian Home Rule League and became an important member of the Indian National Congress. She was a member and a leader of the Theosophical Society, contributing to the worldwide spread of this esoteric spiritual movement

A well-known physician and the inventor of several medical implements and the “mobile medical unit,” Bethune was a social justice advocate for the poor in Canada and an outspoken Communist. He engaged in international political struggles, notably in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and in China during the Sino-Japanese War.

A gallery founded by art dealer, collector, and painter Betty Parsons in 1946 in Manhattan. Betty Parsons Gallery was an early supporter of many American Abstract Expressionist artists. The gallery closed in the 1980s.

A versatile visual artist, performer, educator, and political activist whose “expanded concept of art,” as he put it, held that every individual could act creatively, and that creativity could infuse every aspect of life. Animals are an important theme in Joseph Beuys’s frequently Symbolist and expressionistic works. He also made use of felt and fat in his artworks, as these materials held deep significance for him.

A Toronto-based artist who has collaborated with Carole Condé as an artistic duo since the late 1960s. Their early interest in the Conceptual art movement gave way to creating socially engaged art in the 1970s. Condé and Beveridge have collaborated with numerous trade unions and community organizations to produce staged photographic images that address the connections between paid labour, environmental issues, human rights, and class divisions.

Founded in 1996, BGL is an art collective based in Quebec City, Quebec. Its three members, Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère, and Nicolas Laverdière (the initials “BGL” are taken from their last names), create large-scale installation work, often incorporating ironic humour and irreverence, as well as kinetic elements. Shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2006, BGL represented Canada at the 2015 Venice Biennale with the installation Canadassimo.

Considered the leading practitioner of Structurist art, Biederman was a painter whose best-known works are shallow, painted relief wall panels. These works are influenced by Biederman’s interest in geometric non-objective art, in which he incorporated three-dimensional elements with the use of various materials, including wood, plastic, and aluminum. His works would become influential for the later art movement, Op art.

An artistic movement that emerged from the expanding bourgeoisie and their staid culture and family life in Central Europe (particularly Germany and Austria) between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the Revolutions of 1848. Biedermeier paintings, whether landscapes, portraits, or genre scenes of everyday domestic activities, are known for their sentimentality.

An important figure in Canadian art history for his arts activism (which contributed to the eventual founding of the Canada Council for the Arts), teaching, and prolific creative output. His paintings, murals, prints, and sculptures fuse a modernist concern for form, line, and colour with regionalist subjects: rural landscapes, figures, and genre scenes.

A Kingston, Ontario-born sculptor and educator, currently based in Pickering, Ontario. Ted Bieler is known for his large-scale, public artworks on display throughout Canada and internationally, including Triad, 1984, installed on Toronto’s Front Street. Bieler taught at the Albright-Knox Art School at the University of Buffalo, the University of Toronto, and York University in the Department of Visual Arts and Art History, School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, where he is now Professor Emeritus.

A large-scale exhibition of international and Brazilian art held every two years since 1951 in São Paulo, Brazil. It is the world’s second-oldest art biennial after the Biennale di Venezia and among the most important arts events in Latin America. Held in the Sao Ciccillo Matarazzo pavilion in the Parque do Ibirapuera, it features the participation of dozens of countries in each iteration.

One of the preeminent American landscape painters of the nineteenth century, Bierstadt is known for his large-scale paintings of the American West. When he was two his family moved from Prussia to Massachusetts. Bierstadt would return to Europe to study and train throughout his twenties. His career flourished when he began applying his technical proficiency to panoramic landscapes steeped in symbolism. Bierstadt was among the last generation of artists of the Hudson River School.

Vancouver artist Bertram Charles (B.C.) Binning, one of the first Canadian modernist painters on the West Coast, was influenced by modernist architecture. A belief in the intermingling of art, architecture, and life led him to found, along with Fred Amess, the Art in Living Group at the Vancouver School of Art in 1943. He also founded the School of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 1949. 

In contrast to anthropocentrism, Biocentrism is an ethical stance that values all forms of life equally rather than placing more inherent value on human beings over nature. Tied to environmental ethics and activism, biocentrism considers every species as part of an interdependent community and calls for a rethinking of humans’ relationship to their environment.

A form of abstraction that draws on rounded, natural forms, “biomorphic” appears as a descriptive term for abstract art around the 1930s, though it is not limited to this time period. It can be seen in the design elements of Art Nouveau and in the surrealist paintings and sculptures of Jean Arp and Joan Miró, as well as in the work of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and in American design from the 1940s through the 1960s.
 

An acronym for Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, the term is applied in North American contexts to centre the experiences of these groups, to recognize that they are impacted by systemic racism, and to demonstrate solidarity among them. The introduction of the term has been traced to 2013 but it has become more widely used since the 2020 racial justice uprisings in response to police brutality.

Sacred scrolls made of birchbark, on which the Anishinaabe draw geometrical shapes and patterns to depict songs and other details of rituals. The scrolls are used in religious ceremonies and as a means of cultural transmission.

A Saulteaux and Cree artist from George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan who studied at the University of Regina and teaches at First Nations University of Canada. Keith Bird is known for his paintings of Indigenous warriors and works exploring the survivance of Indigenous spiritual practices.

A Montreal artist and educator, Bisson worked primarily in sculpture, producing numerous works in plaster and contributing bronzes to public monuments including the Monument à la gloire des Patriotes commemorating regional heroes of the 1837 rebellion in what is now Quebec. He was also an academic painter of still lifes and genre scenes. One of Bisson’s students was the artist Jean Paul Riopelle as a youth.

A multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work examines disability, queerness, and social justice. As part of the Vancouver-based lesbian art collective Kiss & Tell, she championed pro-sexual, anti-censorship messages around queer visibility and identity. Known for merging personal narratives with political critique, she uses her work to challenge norms, amplify marginalized voices, and initiate dialogue on accessibility and inclusion.

Born in Toronto and a student of Mary Hiester Reid, Hattie Blackstock was an artist. After pursuing a course of study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, she went on to become a medical illustrator at the medical faculty at McGill University in the 1920s.

A Newfoundland-born printmaker known for his epic narrative depictions of life and mythology set across the province’s rugged seascapes and landscapes. Blackwood was named Honorary Chair of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in 2003. He was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the AGO in 2011 as well as of an Academy Award-nominated documentary, Blackwood, in 1976.

A poet, visual artist, and mystical philosopher, considered a seminal figure of the Romantic period. Deeply religious and unconventional, Blake was fervently anti-rationalist and anti-materialist. Among his small circle of admirers were the Ancients (a group of English artists) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Known for his paintings of religious, mythological, and historical subjects, as well as portraits, Joseph Blanc was a French painter trained at the École des beaux-arts. He won the Prix de Rome in 1867 and later participated in the decoration of several important buildings in Paris, including the Panthéon, the Opéra-Comique, and the Hôtel de Ville.

Formed in 1911, a collective of artists of disparate styles and concerns—including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, August Macke, and Franz Marc—regarded as representing the apex of German Expressionism. The group had only two exhibitions before disbanding with the onset of the First World War.

A spiritualist and the prolific author of books on ancient wisdom traditions, the occult, and esoteric religions, Madame Blavatsky was a co-founder of the Theosophical Society in New York City in 1875.

A pianist and composer who figured prominently in the free-jazz movement of the 1960s, which emphasized improvisation over fixed composition, and whose pieces have been performed by musicians including George Russell and Jimmy Giuffre. Bley helped found the influential Jazz Composers’ Guild in New York in 1964.

An artist and curator, Willem (Wim) Adriaan Blom was research curator at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from 1962 to 1968, when he became an administrator; in 1963 he was the founding editor of the National Gallery of Canada Bulletin. After leaving his post at the gallery in 1970, he devoted himself to painting, producing primarily ordered, still-life compositions of domestic objects rendered in a stark, realistic style.

An informal group of writers, artists, and intellectuals who met regularly at the home of Vanessa Bell (the sister of Virginia Woolf) in London, England. They discussed and shared innovative ideas on aesthetics, literature, economics, politics, feminism, and sexuality, which are considered to have influenced modern attitudes and art; however, the group is often criticized for their elitist lifestyles. Notable members include Clive Bell, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Edward Morgan Forster, and Virginia Woolf.

A founding member of the painting group the Regina Five, Ronald Bloore was an abstract painter and educator. Seeking a transcendental quality he saw in the architecture of ancient Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, Bloore destroyed his earlier work and began explorations in black and white, employing bold, organic shapes. Architecture continued to inform his practice. Eventually he incorporated the discipline into his work, making small, three-dimensional maquettes before creating full-scale versions.

Initially a furniture store, the Blue Barn Gallery became Ottawa’s leading contemporary art space in the 1960s. Located in Bells Corners, an Ottawa suburb, the gallery was led by artist Duncan de Kergommeaux, who organized exhibitions by prominent Canadian artists, including Takao Tanabe, Richard Gorman, and Harold Town. Significantly, the core collection of the Carleton University Art Gallery came from the Blue Barn Gallery’s roster. The gallery closed in 1967.

Founded in 1953 by Denis Tupy and Jozo Weider and closed in 2004, Blue Mountain Pottery was based in Collingwood, Ontario. The pottery is recognizable by Blue Mountain’s signature glazing technique called “reflowing decorating,” in which light and dark glazes are applied simultaneously to produce a distinctive streaked effect.

Notable dancer, teacher, and percussionist who pioneered the integration of dance with activism, therapy, and anthropology. In 1933, in New York, Boas founded the Boas School of Dance, one of the few racially integrated schools at the time. She served as its director until 1949. Prominent students of the Boas School include Françoise Sullivan, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage. Forgoing technical perfection, Boas approached dance as socially, politically, and emotionally driven.

A master woodcarver, bronze sculptor, and arts educator recognized for his Tlingit-style bowls, masks, and totem poles, Bob began carving in 1969 when studying with the famed Haida artist Freda Diesing in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. He often works with alder and cedar wood and references the oral histories of his community. In 2013 Bob was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

The youngest official Canadian war artist appointed during the Second World War, Bobak was a Polish-born painter and printmaker. Influenced by the European Expressionists, he is best known for his figure studies and, in the 1950s, became a prominent member of the postwar Vancouver art scene. He was married to fellow painter Molly Lamb Bobak and, from 1962 to 1988, served as director of the Art Centre at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.

Vancouver-born artist Molly Lamb Bobak studied with Jack Shadbolt at the Vancouver School of Art. She served in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps during the Second World War and, in 1945, became the first woman to be named an Official War Artist. Her work includes both delicate floral studies in watercolour and depictions of interiors and of the crowds that animate scenes of regional life rendered in oil. In the 1950s and 1960s she gave televised art courses that were broadcast on various regional networks. (See Molly Lamb Bobak: Life & Work by Michelle Gewurtz.)

A painter, sculptor, and Futurist theorist, Umberto Boccioni was one of the authors of the 1910 “Manifesto of Futurist Painting” and the 1912 “Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” which advocated a style built on Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist philosophy of violence, speed, and power. His paintings capture the dynamic energy of the movement in swirling, fragmented figures; his sculptures draw on Cubist principles, which he adapted to Futurist themes executed in unconventional materials including wood and cement.

A painter and draftsman who in the early 1830s was hired to accompany an expedition to the American West specifically to record images of its cities, landscapes, and people. His depictions of the American wilderness were greatly admired in his time for their beauty and anthropological detail. In 1848 Bodmer joined the Barbizon School of painters in France, whose inspiration came from nature.

Watercolour pigment mixed with gum or binder and white pigment added to make it opaque. Bodycolour is often used interchangeably with gouache, although the terms and techniques have slight differences in history and composition, with bodycolour being traditionally made with an animal-derived binder and gouache with gum arabic (acacia gum).

A designer, design and cultural theorist, and architect by training, Boigon directs and lectures in the Architectural Studies program at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on locomotive design and video game architecture.

Alfred Boisseau was a renowned Parisian painter and photographer who immigrated to the United States around 1844. He achieved recognition in New Orleans in the 1840s for his paintings of Indigenous peoples before becoming a daguerreotypist in Cleveland in the 1850s. He moved to Canada in 1861 and operated three studios in Montreal before relocating to Manitoba.

One of Canada’s foremost abstract painters of his generation, Bolduc continued the modernist tradition of Jack Bush, Jules Olitski, and Robert Motherwell and is known for lyrical and contemplative works that consider how layers of colour influence the reflection of light. He draws on Chinese calligraphy, North African designs, and Persian miniatures. His works are in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton.

Born in London’s East End and educated at the Slade School of Fine Art, Bomberg was a member of the early-twentieth-century British avant-garde and associated with the Vorticists and with the group of Anglo-Jewish writers and artists later known as the Whitechapel Boys. His angular, abstract paintings were included in the first Vorticist exhibition in London in 1915, though he had not signed the group’s earlier manifesto. After the First World War he began painting in a more naturalistic style.

A Nova Scotian artist best known for her Impressionistic landscape and portrait paintings. She studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art (now NSCAD University) and the Art Students League of New York before earning her MFA from Columbia University. She later taught painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art.

A Wendat sculptor whose art is characterized by a blend of industrial and organic forms and is inspired by the urban environment. Ludovic Boney has produced several public sculptures in which the interior space is as important as the exterior, challenging perceptions of the works’ boundaries and creating a sense of mystery and ambiguity.

A figurative sculptor known for his colourful personality and his fibreglass fusions of the human body with machines such as motorcycles and airplanes. In 1968, Bonham befriended sculptors Ed Zelenak and Walter Redinger and moved from the U.S. to London, Ontario, where he taught at H.B. Beal Technical School, Western University, and Fanshawe College. He was the first American to become a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

A French artist known for her realist, dramatic paintings of animals, with a particular focus on depictions of livestock and pastoral scenes. Born in Bordeaux and based in Paris for most of her life, she received widespread acclaim during her career and was the first female artist to be awarded the French Legion of Honour in 1865.

Romantic landscape watercolourist who emigrated to France at age fourteen. Bonington studied with Baron Gros at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and befriended Eugène Delacroix, who influenced him to paint historical subjects. He exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1822. Bonington died of tuberculosis in London, aged twenty-five.

A painter and printmaker associated with the Nabis, a group of French Post-Impressionist artists who emerged in the late 1880s and maintained a distance from the Parisian avant-garde. Bonnard often worked in a decorative mode and with an Impressionist use of colour; he painted interior scenes and landscapes, created posters and theatre sets, and designed household objects.

Born in Bayonne, Léon Bonnat was a respected French portrait painter and teacher. His roughly two hundred depictions of prominent Europeans and Americans—including Victor Hugo, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Louis Pasteur, and other contemporaries—were strongly influenced by Diego Velázquez. An important teacher, Bonnat became the director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1905.

Born Linda Elizabeth Borden, the film director Lizzie Borden took the name of the notorious nineteenth century figure, who was famously tried and acquitted for the brutal murders of her father and step-mother, as an act of youthful rebellion. Beginning with Regrouping (1976), Borden’s films use feminist dystopias to address issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality and reject narrow framings of feminist discourse. 

A quarterly arts and culture magazine based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Border Crossings was founded in 1971. It publishes reviews, articles, interviews, and portfolios related to Canadian and international artists across all disciplines.

The leader of the avant-garde Automatistes and one of Canada’s most important modern artists. Borduas was also an influential advocate for reform in Quebec, calling for liberation from religious and narrow nationalist values in the 1948 manifesto Refus global. (See Paul-Émile Borduas: Life & Work by François-Marc Gagnon.)

Eli Bornstein is a Milwaukee-born artist and educator who in 1950 was hired by the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, where he became a major force in modernizing art in the province. He developed a distinctive practice combining painting and sculpture called Structurist Relief, which is both abstract and grounded in nature. He retired from his influential teaching career in 1990.

A highly influential artist known for pictures populated by multitudes of fantastic creatures and filled with marvellous detail. Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500)—a triptych depicting the pleasures of the Garden of Eden, the horrors of the Last Judgment, and the world in between—is among the most famous paintings in the Western art historical canon.

A form of rendering plant life with detailed accuracy as a way of visually recording and identifying various plant species, botanical drawings generally depict specific plant characteristics, germination processes, and, oftentimes, dissections.

A highly renowned Florentine painter and draftsman. Among Botticelli’s best-known works are his frescoes that decorate Rome’s Sistine Chapel, and his mythological paintings The Birth of Venus, 1482–85, held at the Uffizi Gallery Museum, Florence, and Venus and Mars, c. 1485, held at the National Gallery, London.

Born in Chaumont, Edmé Bouchardon was a celebrated sculptor and draftsman who served as a royal artist to Louis XV, producing significant sculptures for the gardens of Versailles. Bouchardon’s work is considered a precursor to neoclassicism, though his later pieces included rococo elements. He was also known for his life drawings.

A Brooklyn-born photographer best known for her portraits of notable celebrities, socialites, and artistic figures. Alongside her shots of famous painters, poets, and writers, she also created allegorical and theatrical images of women and children, often in outdoor settings. She was closely affiliated with the Photo-Secession movement, which advanced the idea of photography as a form of fine art, and often exhibited alongside the group.

A painter known for his academic approach to his craft, Bouguereau was arguably one of the most famous artists in France during his time. Many of his highly realist paintings were mythological and allegorical, and his interpretation of human subject matter was sentimental.

Often described as a Neoclassical painter, Boulanger was known for his paintings of life in ancient Greece and Rome, though he also painted scenes in North Africa, where he travelled in 1845. He later became a teacher at the École des beaux-arts and the Académie Julian. He encouraged his students to focus on the accuracy of their drawings.

Napoléon Bourassa was an architect, writer, painter, and sculptor. During his long career, he directed numerous church construction and decoration projects in French Canada. Of these, the most complex is Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes in Montreal. He was influenced by Michelangelo, Raphael, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Hippolyte Flandrin. Between 1870 and 1904, he designed and decorated eight churches.

Born in Paris, Bourgeois moved to New York City in 1938, where she would establish herself as an artist. Although she began her career in printmaking and drawing, she became known for her psychologically charged sculptures and installations. Bourgeois’s work draws on childhood trauma, her complicated relationships with her parents, and her relationship to sex and her body, often through recurring figures (the spider in particular). Overlooked for decades, her art began to attract wide acclaim in the 1970s, when its feminist implications became a subject of interest for critics, artists, and audiences.

A New York City–born photographer known for her documentary approach, covering social issues such as poverty, race relations, industrial conditions in America, and global politics. She was a pioneer in her field: the first female photojournalist hired at LIFE Magazine, the first woman to work as a war correspondent during the Second World War, and the first Western photographer to be allowed access into the Soviet Union.

One of Nova Scotia’s leading folk artists, Ralph Boutilier established his reputation as a landscape painter before venturing into carving in the 1960s. Based in Milton, Nova Scotia, Boutilier is best known for his large wood and metal whirligigs modelled after various species of birds, although he also carved human figures. His work is found in the collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

A Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, and writer whose practice often draws on her Black Prairie pioneer heritage. Bowen is a descendent of Black settlers of Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. In examining personal and public archives, Bowen addresses histories of enslavement, migration, and discrimination. She holds a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and in 2016 received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

An itinerant portrait painter active in the United States, Europe, and Canada. In Quebec City, Montreal, and Toronto Bowman received commissions from leading society members and politicians; he completed ten paintings for Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica (eight of which are now lost).

An abstract artist, printmaker, and arts educator whose gestural works are notable for their use of fluorescent coloured paint. He worked in various art schools, including the Chicago Institute of Art—where he taught the Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell—the University of Manitoba, and Stanford University.

The owner and director of Inuit Fine Art Gallery in Port Hope, Ontario, Boyd is a writer and curator specializing in Inuit art, especially that produced by artists in Kinngait (Cape Dorset). After travelling to Cape Dorset in 1980 for a temporary position at the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (whose art division is now known as Kinngait Studios), Boyd spent the first decades of her career travelling back and forth between Toronto and Cape Dorset while working for the Co-op and its marketing and wholesale division, Dorset Fine Arts. She opened her Port Hope gallery in 2018.

A nonrepresentational painter known for his use of symmetric patterns of arrows, triangles, and rectangles found in Plains First Nations beadwork and hide painting. Boyer was influenced by colour-field painting and the Abstract Expressionism of the Regina Five in the 1960s. In the 1980s he began painting on blankets to signal the fraught Indigenous histories in Canada. From 1981 to 1998 and in 2004, Boyer served as Head of Visual Arts at the First Nations University of Canada (formerly the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College).

A largely self-taught painter who grew up in London, Ontario, Boyle is a founding member of the Nihilist Spasm Band and exhibited with the London Regionalists. An ardent Canadian, he is particularly noted for his contributions to sociopolitical art in Canada. Over the years, Boyle has been an important agitator for artists’ rights: he is a cofounder of the Niagara Artists Centre and the first spokesperson of Canadian Artists’ Representation Ontario (CARO).

A leading contemporary artist with a politically and personally oriented practice that incorporates drawing, sculpture, painting, and performance. She works independently and collaboratively: past collaborations include Universal Cobra, 2015, with Shuvinai Ashoona and Illuminations Project, 2005–15, with Emily Duke. Boyle represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

An experimental, non-narrative filmmaker interested in the act of seeing and in encouraging people to see differently. His film Dog Star Man, 1961–64, is considered a pivotal work of the 1960s American avant-garde. Following twenty years as a film history professor in Colorado, he retired to Canada in 2002.

An abstract sculptor working in wood, stone, and bronze, Constantin Brâncuși used simple geometric lines and shapes to create expressions of natural forms. Active for most of his life in Paris, he became known in the United States following his inclusion in the Armory Show, the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art. Brâncuși was a significant influence on artists Isamu Noguchi, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth, and the Minimalist movement of the 1960s.

A prolific and influential visual artist in Canada, Brandtner immigrated to this country in 1928 and quickly established himself as a commercial artist and set designer; he also mounted a solo exhibition soon after his arrival. German Expressionism influenced his artistic output, as did his interest in social justice. He was an active teacher, and with Norman Bethune established the Children’s Art Centre, a Montreal arts school for poor children.

A seminal figure in the history of modern art. Working alongside Picasso from 1908 to 1914, Braque developed the principles of major phases of Analytic and Synthetic Cubism and, along with the latter, the use of collage. After the First World War, he pursued a personal style of Cubism admired for its compositional and colouristic subtleties.

Also known as C. Herbert, Claude Breeze began creating the brightly coloured Pop Art–influenced paintings for which he is best known in Vancouver in the 1960s. Breeze was the first Canadian artist to depict mediatized violence in his work, and his paintings often address social and political issues. An educator as well as a painter, he has held teaching positions at universities across Canada and is currently professor emeritus at York University in Toronto.

A poet and the leader of the Surrealists, whose members included the artists Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and Man Ray, and the poets Paul and Gala Éluard. Breton outlined in successive manifestos the tenets and techniques of Surrealism, and he organized the group’s first exhibition in 1925.

Elisa Breton, née Bindhoff, was a Surrealist artist and writer and the third wife of André Breton, leader of the Surrealist movement in Paris. She met Breton in New York City after she immigrated there in the early 1940s, and they married in 1945, moving to Paris in 1946. Although she is mentioned in André Breton’s works and was an active member of the Surrealist circle in Paris, Elisa Breton published and exhibited infrequently.

An influential modernist designer and architect associated with the Bauhaus, Breuer designed sculptural furniture with lightweight metal or wood. In 1926 he created the iconic Wassily chair (named after Wassily Kandinsky). After emigrating to the United States in 1937, Breuer focused on architecture, though he continued to design furniture.

A Toronto artist who foregrounds Black diasporic experience in her multidisciplinary practice, encompassing photography, video, drawing, and painting. Born to parents who emigrated from Guyana to Toronto in the late 1960s, Sandra Brewster conveys the intricate relationship between identity and movement, at times guiding the viewer through a metaphorical journey.

A Polish-born Canadian painter who rose to prominence with the Jewish Painters of Montreal group in the 1950s and 1960s. Briansky is recognized for her images of childhood and intimate portraits of women.

A commercial artist and, from 1914 to 1956, manager of Brigdens of Winnipeg Limited, a branch of one of Canada’s oldest printing and graphic design firms, founded by his uncle. Apprenticed in wood- and photo-engraving, Brigden employed, supported, and collected the works of many young artists, including Charles Comfort, Eric Bergman, and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. He served on the art committee that supervised both the Winnipeg School of Art and Winnipeg Art Gallery, his estate later donating most of his important Canadian art collection to the gallery.

Born in London, Fred Brigden was a landscape painter who studied at the Toronto Art Students’ League under William Cruikshank and George Agnew Reid. He was known for his atmospheric realist paintings of Ontario, Quebec, and Maritime settings, as well as for his business acumen. Influenced by English watercolourists, he was also a long-time illustrator at the Toronto Engraving Company.

The British Columbia College of Arts was a short-lived Vancouver institution founded by Jock Macdonald and Frederick Varley in 1933. Created after internal conflict and reduced pay forced its two founding members out of their teaching positions at the Vancouver School of Art, the college offered students multidisciplinary classes and took a modernist approach to aesthetics and artmaking. It closed in 1935 due to lack of funds.

The British Empire Exhibition was a celebration of colonial industry, natural resources, and culture held in 1924 and 1925 at Wembley Park in London, England. Featuring gardens, pavilions, a stadium, and an amusement park, the grand exhibition was intended to enhance trade and economic connections between Britain’s various territories, fifty-six of which were participants. Canada’s pavilion highlighted not only the dominion’s dairy, mining, forestry, and rail industries, but also recent and contemporary Canadian art. The program included cultural as well as commercial events, attracting over 20 million visitors over the course of the exhibition.

Brittain first trained with Elizabeth Russell Holt, a central figure of the arts scene in Saint John, New Brunswick, before studying at the Art Students League of New York from 1930 to 1932. His drawings, paintings, watercolours, and murals reveal an enduring interest in social realism and psychology. Brittain was a founding member of the Federation of Canadian Artists.

A British painter and commercial artist who worked at Grip Limited with Tom Thomson and other artists who went on to form the Group of Seven. He accompanied Thomson on a sketching trip in northern Ontario in 1912.

Born in Russia, Brodovitch immigrated to the United States and became a photographer, graphic designer, and teacher who had a profound impact on generations of American photographers through his Design Laboratory. He was the art director for Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958, where he spearheaded elegant and experimental pairings of typography and photography that became popular in the 1940s and 1950s.

An Oregon-born editor, curator, and educator who lived in Canada from 1965 to 1982, and from 2016 to 2018. Anne Trueblood Brodzky was curator of education at the London Regional Art Gallery from 1965 to 1967; editor of artscanada, a prominent Canadian art magazine, from 1967 to 1982; and director of the Meridian Art Gallery, a non-profit exhibition and performance space in San Francisco from 1985 to 2015, which she founded with her husband, Anthony Williams.

A British-born painter, illustrator, musician, poet, Governor General’s Award–winning novelist, and Toronto advertising executive. In 1927, Brooker became the first Canadian artist to exhibit abstract art. His work is in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and other major collections. (See Bertram Brooker: Life & Work by James King.)

A Toronto-born official Canadian war artist during the Second World War, Brooks, who served in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, is notable for his wartime paintings of naval life on Canada’s east coast. In the late 1940s, Brooks and his wife Reva―a prominent photographer―emigrated to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, there forming an informal artist colony.

An accomplished painter and carpet designer who also produced etchings and engravings, Broomfield trained under Arthur Lismer at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) and was mentored by members of the Group of Seven, including J.E.H. MacDonald and Franklin Carmichael at their Port Hope summer school in 1920 and 1921. Broomfield enlisted with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, capturing his experiences in paint.

A multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Brown is known for minimalist works that examine silence, language, science, and time. His recent works have considered scarcity economies through the tension of heavy labour invested in a temporary medium, such as wall text in a gallery.

A painter from rural Ontario whose work consistently explores themes of time, society, and the inhabited landscape. As a boy he was mentored by A.Y. Jackson and Will Ogilvie, but it was his family’s temporary move to northern Europe, where he first encountered an art-historical pantheon that included Vermeer and Bruegel, that had the greatest impact on his technique and subjects.

As the first director of the National Gallery of Canada, Eric Brown held the position from 1912 until his death. Earlier, he had been curator of the gallery’s collection, at the invitation of Sir Edmund Walker, a banker and major patron of the arts. Brown was a passionate builder of the gallery’s collections, both international and Canadian, and travelled often to Europe to make contacts with artists and dealers.

A British oil painter and art teacher, Brown energetically opposed the conservatism of the Royal Academy of Arts in both his own style and his teaching methods. He became a founding member of the New English Art Club in 1886. He was influenced by James McNeill Whistler, the rustic Naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage, and Impressionism. Brown served as principal of the Westminster School of Art from 1877 to 1892 and taught at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1893 to 1918.

Born in Massachusetts but based in Ottawa for most of his career, Franklin Brownell was a widely recognized landscape painter, educator, and administrator. He trained in Boston and Paris before becoming the director of the Ottawa Art School in 1886. He taught many accomplished artists, including Pegi Nicol MacLeod, Ernest Fosbery, and Goodridge Roberts. Brownell’s own style ranged from social realism to Impressionism. His works are widely represented in the National Gallery of Canada.

Regarded as one of Canada’s first Impressionist painters, Bruce studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and spent time at the artists’ colonies in Barbizon, Giverny, and Grez-sur-Loing, France. Two Canadian scholarships for artists are named in his honour, offering an opportunity to paint on the island of Gotland, Sweden, where he established an artist estate with his wife, the sculptor Carolina Benedicks-Bruce. A bequest of Bruce’s works by his wife and father to the City of Hamilton, Ontario, became the basis of the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

An acknowledged master of the Northern Renaissance, known for the inventiveness of his work and its enduring and widespread popularity. His landscapes, parables, and religious images circulated widely as prints, ensuring the primacy of his creations within the visual culture of his era. Bruegel’s paintings often depicted the lives of Flemish commoners.

A painter and influential teacher who contributed greatly to the development of painting in Canada, William Brymner taught at the Art Association of Montreal. Several of his students, including A.Y. Jackson, Edwin Holgate, and Prudence Heward, became prominent figures in Canadian art. (See William Brymner: Life & Work by Jocelyn Anderson.)

An art historian, arts administrator, and the founder of the National Film Society of Canada (now the Canadian Film Institute). Buchanan worked for Canadian arts and media organizations throughout his career, including the National Film Board and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In the late 1950s, he began a parallel career as a photographer; his work was exhibited several times before his final appointment as director of the International Fine Arts Exhibition at Expo 67.

A German art historian and critic widely recognized for his influential analyses and writings on modern and contemporary art in America and Europe during the post-war period. He has held professorships at institutions including the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University. Before retiring in 2021, he served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University.

A Surrealist filmmaker, Luis Buñuel began his career with Un chien andalou, 1929, in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. Finding himself in conflict with Fascist Spain, Buñuel lived in exile from 1936 to 1960, settling in Mexico City in 1949, where he created small commercial films that nevertheless remain rooted in his Communist politics, eroticism, Surrealism, and rejection of religion. After he returned to Europe in the 1960s, Buñuel’s later works such as Belle de jour, 1967, and Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972, brought to a wide audience his Surrealist conception of a world in which violent dreams erupt into chaos.

Italian for “true fresco,” a wall-painting technique where colour pigments are mixed in water and applied directly to wet plaster on the wall. The pigments must be applied quickly and are permanently bound to the wall, making it difficult to alter the plaster without removing it and starting over.

An artist and writer known for his conceptual use of stripes in site-specific installations. Daniel Buren’s works often explore the inherent properties of light and materials like glass, paper, and mirror, focusing on the way they interact with space to challenge traditional notions of art and its relationship to the environment.

The central figure in the Russian Futurist movement of the early twentieth century, David Burliuk was a painter, poet, and critic who promoted avant-garde art in the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire, participating in and appearing at exhibitions that included performances. Following the Russian Revolution, Burliuk spent from 1920 to 1922 in Japan before moving to the United States.

A largely self-taught painter, illustrator, and designer, who became interested in art after meeting William Morris at Oxford, where Edward Burne-Jones had intended to study for the priesthood. In the 1850s he moved to London, joining the Pre-Raphaelites soon before they disbanded. Like his forerunners in the group, he chose subjects that were largely medieval and mythical.

A former doctor, Burri started painting as a prisoner of war in the United States in the early 1940s, eventually incorporating unorthodox materials into his work, such as burlap sacks and sand. In 1951 he co-founded—with Mario Ballocco, Ettore Colla, and Giuseppe Capogrossi—the Gruppo Origine, which opposed the decorative aspect of abstract art, preferring its “incisive, expressive function.”

A prolific and celebrated Beat Generation writer, best known for the novel Naked Lunch, 1959. Permeated with an anarchic attitude, his work influenced later countercultural groups including hippies and punks. His life was famously marked by drug and alcohol addiction, criminality, and violence, including the murder of his second wife in Mexico, for which he never served a sentence.

A painter, illustrator, and teacher who rose to prominence with his overtly sexual, semi-abstract paintings of the 1960s. He was represented by the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s and was a co-founder of the Artists’ Jazz Band.

As a critic and collector, Philippe Burty advocated for the artistic importance of etching. Through his collecting, his writing, and his own work, he spearheaded a revival in printmaking. An enthusiastic collector of Japanese art, he coined the term japonisme in 1872.

An award-winning photographer of international renown, Toronto-based Burtynsky is best recognized for his striking images of industrialism’s devastating effect on the environment. His large-scale, sublime photographic landscapes of the 1970s reflect his interest in the intersections between painting and photography. In 1985 Burtynsky founded the Toronto Image Works, a state-of-the-art photo laboratory, training centre, and darkroom rental facility. His recent work continues his exploration of human impact on the natural world, and he is a collaborator on the Anthropocene Project, a multidisciplinary investigation of the proposed term for our current geological era.

A member of Painters Eleven, formed in 1953, Bush found his real voice only after critic Clement Greenberg visited his studio in 1957 and focused on his watercolours. Out of these Bush developed the shapes and broad colour planes that would come to characterize a personal colour-field style, parallel to the work of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. With them, Bush participated in Greenberg’s 1964 exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction.

Born on Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Butler is a painter, writer, and book illustrator. He received formal training at the Art Students League of New York. In the 1980s Butler self-published Art of War: Painting It out of the Picture, which explores his compositions about war and militarism.

Born and based in Winnipeg, Butler is a multidisciplinary artist, whose artistic practice embraces and explores artistic exchange and collaboration. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and La maison rouge in Paris.

A visual arts-focused periodical based in Toronto and founded in 1984, specializing in the publication of reviews, criticism, and art writing on contemporary Canadian art and culture. Published online and in print three times a year, each issue of the magazine is centred around a specific theme related to ongoing developments in the Canadian art world.

Cabaret Voltaire is an artists’ cabaret in Zurich that is regarded as the birthplace of the European Dada movement in 1916, amid the First World War. The home of early absurdist and rebellious performances and exhibitions, participants included co-founders Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings as well as Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Tristan Tzara.

A card-mounted photograph used almost exclusively for portraiture, similar in style and purpose to cartes-de-visite but larger and popularized later. Cabinet card prints were originally albumen but were later produced using gelatin silver, collodion, platinum, or carbon processes.

A Montreal-born artist known primarily for her photography and large-scale audiovisual installations, which typically explore themes of identity, gender, and the human body. Cadieux has represented Canada at both the Biennale di Venezia and the Bienal de São Paulo, and has been the subject of solo exhibitions internationally. She received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2011.

Working in egg tempera, Cadmus produced detailed realist paintings that satirized and eroticized American culture. After working in commercial art and spending several years in Europe with fellow artist and romantic partner Jared French in the 1930s, Cadmus began his career with commissions for the WPA’s Public Works of Art Project in New York City. He gained public notoriety when his painting of sailors carousing with male and female partners attracted an admiral’s ire, igniting a scandal around his “unflattering” depiction of the Navy.

An avant-garde composer, John Cage worked from principles of randomness and indeterminacy, his influence extending beyond minimalist and electronic music to conceptual and performance art. His best-known piece is 4’33”, a work in three movements, during which a performer remains silent on stage, often seated at a piano, for the specified time of 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Other works relied on the I Ching to generate structure or were composed for a prepared piano—“prepared” in that objects were inserted into the strings, altering the sounds. Cage had a long collaboration with modern dance pioneer Merce Cunningham, his partner in life and art.

Born in Copenhagen, Cahén attended the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and taught design, illustration, and painting at Prague’s Rotter School of Graphic Arts before his family’s anti-Nazi activities forced him to flee to England. He was deported to Canada as an enemy alien and settled in Montreal before moving to Toronto in 1943; he was one of the founders of Painters Eleven in 1953. (See Oscar Cahén: Life & Work by Jaleen Grove.)

A Surrealist photographer, sculptor, and writer who challenged conventional notions of gender identity. Cahun is known for taking gender-ambiguous self-portraits dressed up as various characters, including a soldier, an angel, an aviator, and a doll. Born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob, Cahun began using the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1917. After moving to Paris with their romantic and creative partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Alberte Malherbe) in 1920, they joined the Surrealist movement and also participated in avant-garde theatre.

A major nineteenth-century French painter, Caillebotte was also a collector and promoter of Impressionist art. At his painting debut in the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876, he showed images depicting the urban working class. Originally a lawyer, Caillebotte often painted interior scenes of upper-class everyday life and cityscapes, with a focus on perspective and composition.

A Montreal-born painter of social realist works and an educator who co-founded the Montreal Artists School in the 1940s with her first husband, Alfred Pinsky. Caiserman was the first painter to receive a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and she also served as a critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Born in Montreal into a wealthy timber family, John Calder was the founder of the London, England, publishing house John Calder Publishers. A dynamic figure in the literary world, beginning in the 1950s he published avant-garde British, American, and European authors, challenging obscenity laws and promoting writers from Eugène Ionesco and Marguerite Duras to Hubert Selby Jr. Calder was an especially strong supporter of the work of Samuel Beckett, a long-time friend, whose plays he both produced and published.

A painter who challenges modernist gestural painting by employing collage techniques, Cale is known for her meticulous processes that include cutting painted canvases to add to other works and gluing layers of dried acrylic paint to canvases to mimic brushstrokes. Cale was shortlisted for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2009 and 2010.

A group of artists important to the history of modern art in Canada. The Calgary Group promoted non-objective art in Western Canada in the late 1940s, at the same time that Paul-Émile Borduas and the Automatistes advocated for its legitimacy in Quebec and elsewhere.

Founded in 1909 by six local artists, the CSC hosts plein air camps, art sales, and educational workshops for its more than one hundred members. Beginning in the 1930s, artists Marion Nicoll and James McLaren Nicoll were active participants. A non-profit organization, the CSC is supported by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

California Funk was a bohemian 1960s art movement especially prevalent in the Bay Area that embraced the playful, sensuous, and scrappy in the face of the self-seriousness of Abstract Expressionism. Its name was inspired by jazz, where “funk” signified an earthy sensibility (as well as a pungent odour). Assemblage and ceramics were important Funk mediums.

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.

A monochromatic painting technique that employs two or three tints of one colour to render an image without regard to the scene’s natural or realistic colours. An ancient technique, camaïeu has been used in decorative arts, friezes, and enamel work to simulate the appearance of relief sculpture.

A drawing aid popular in the early nineteenth century, which projects the object to be drawn onto a piece of paper by means of a prism. It was patented in 1807 by William Hyde Wollaston and famously used by William Henry Fox Talbot, whose poor drawing skills partly motivated his early experiments in photography.

From the Latin for “dark chamber,” a camera obscura is an early photographic device. Originally small, dark rooms to which light was admitted by a single small hole, they have been used since antiquity to view solar eclipses without damaging the eyes: the hole allows an inverted image of the outside scene to be projected onto the opposite wall. By the sixteenth century, the smaller, portable camera obscura was being used as a drawing aid, projecting an image that an artist could trace. 

A student of the New School of Art in Toronto in the 1960s, Alex Cameron developed a style of painting that featured boldly textured pigment and dynamic use of colour. Influenced by Painters Eleven member Jack Bush, for whom he worked as an assistant, Cameron’s work moved from abstract, conceptual canvases in the 1970s to abstracted landscapes that draw on the Canadian landscape tradition of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven.

A prominent Toronto art dealer, Dorothy Cameron opened her Here and Now Gallery in 1959, changing its name to the eponymous Dorothy Cameron Gallery by 1962. In 1965 Toronto police raided her gallery’s exhibition Eros ’65 and charged Cameron with obscenity for displaying a work by Robert Markle showing two nude women touching each other. Despite arguments for the merits of the work and the exhibition, Cameron was found guilty. She closed her gallery, but re-emerged as an artist in the late 1970s, creating sculptural work.

An English-born, Calgary-based artist known for his “thick paintings,” in which he applies thousands of thin coats of acrylic paint to everyday objects. Eric Cameron’s work is held in the collections of major Canadian institutions, including Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada and Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. He was the recipient of the 1994 Gershon Iskowitz Prize and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2004.

A British photographer, born in Calcutta, British India, who was best known for her portraits of famous writers, philosophers, and scientists of the Victorian era, as well as for her allegorical shots of men, women, and children. Her work is marked by its extensive use of soft-focus effects, as well as its highly theatrical nature, often drawing inspiration from and recreating scenes from literature, art, religious narratives, and mythology.

Tammi Campbell is a contemporary artist whose work references Minimalist painters including Frank Stella and Agnes Martin. Her tromp l’oeil two- and three-dimensional works use acrylic paint to represent paper, masking tape, and other materials, references to the processes involved in art production. Since 2010 she has produced a series of drawings, entitled Dear Agnes, as a daily studio exercise riffing on Agnes Martin’s gridded paintings.
 

A major writer and intellectual of the twentieth century, Camus infused his work with philosophy and revolutionary politics and was profoundly influenced by his upbringing in Algeria (then a French territory). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at the age of forty-four.

A Crown corporation created in 1957 by the parliamentary Canada Council for the Arts Act. The Canada Council exists to encourage art production and to promote the study and enjoyment of art in Canada. It provides support to artists and arts organizations from across all artistic disciplines, including visual art, dance, music, and literature.

Formerly Lower Canada, Canada East was the British colonial designation for the northeastern part of the Province of Canada from 1841 to 1867. After Confederation, Canada East became Quebec.

Formerly Upper Canada, Canada West was the British colonial designation for the southwestern part of the Province of Canada from 1841 to 1867. After Confederation, Canada West became Ontario.

The wholesale, art-marketing arm of Arctic Co-operatives Limited, Canadian Arctic Producers has promoted work by Inuit and Dene artists since 1965. It connects northern communities to southern markets, both in Canada and internationally, through a main office in Mississauga, Ontario. Canadian Arctic Producers is Inuit owned, and proceeds are returned to local co-ops across the Arctic.

A quarterly national visual arts periodical published in Toronto. Focusing on contemporary Canadian art, its format included feature articles, interviews, editorials, art news, profiles of artists, and exhibition reviews. Canadian Art underwent several name changes after it was established in 1943. Between 1968 and 1983, it was known as artscanada, after which it became Canadian Art again. The magazine ceased operations in 2021.

Active from 1907 to 1915, the Toronto-based Canadian Art Club was spearheaded by the painters Edmund Morris and Curtis Williamson as a departure from what they viewed as the low standards of the Ontario Society of Artists. The invitation-only club included prominent Canadian painters and sculptors influenced by international developments, including recent Dutch and French painting. One of its goals was to entice expatriates, most notably James Wilson Morrice and Clarence Gagnon, to exhibit in Canada. Homer Watson served as the Canadian Art Club’s first president.

A juried exhibition of Canadian art held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 1968. Prizes were adjudicated by a panel of internationally renowned artists in several categories, including painting and film.

Opened in 1993 in Waterloo, Ontario, to showcase contemporary Canadian ceramic, glass, and enamel work, it is the only gallery of its kind in the country. It offers a variety of educational programming and boasts an extensive library and archive.

Founded in 1970 by Canada’s Department of External Affairs, the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris hosts lectures, film screenings, exhibitions, concerts, and special events. The centre’s aim is to strengthen ties between France and Canada by sharing diverse and innovative Canadian culture through partnerships and collaborations.

Formerly the Canadian Film Awards (1949–78), the Genie Awards were celebrated annually from 1980 to 2012 to recognize achievements in Canadian film, presented under the auspices of the Academy of Canadian Cinema. Winners received the Etrog, a statuette designed in 1968 by and named for the Canadian sculptor Sorel Etrog; in 1980 the award was renamed the Genie. In 1985 the organization became the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, and the Gemini Awards for TV production were added to the annual event in 1987. The ACCT in 2013 acknowledged the contribution of digital media, combining them and the Genie and Gemini prizes into a single inclusive suite of awards—with a statuette that references a screen—and changing the event name to the Canadian Screen Awards.

A non-commercial film distributor dedicated to experimental cinema, founded in 1967 in Toronto. The CFMDC’s collection includes works in Super 8, 16mm, 35mm, and video and digital formats by those filmmakers considered most important to the development of avant-garde cinema in Canada. It is the largest distributor of its kind in the country.

Founded in 1933 after the disbanding of the Group of Seven by former members and their associates, the Canadian Group of Painters championed modernist painting styles against the entrenched traditionalism of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. It provided a platform for artists across Canada who were pursuing a variety of new concerns, from the formal experimentation of Bertram Brooker to the modern-figure subjects of Prudence Heward and Pegi Nicol MacLeod and the expressive landscapes of Emily Carr.

Located in Gatineau, the museum was originally founded in 1856 as a geological museum associated with the Geological Survey of Canada. Its mission later expanded to include ethnography, archaeology, and natural history. In 1968 it was split into three parts, with the ethnographic section becoming the National Museum of Man. Renamed the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 1986, in 1989 it moved to its current building, designed by Douglas Cardinal to reflect the Canadian landscape. Its most recent change of name, in 2010, to the Canadian Museum of History, reflects its current focus on the history and culture of Canada’s peoples.

An annual fair held in Toronto, founded as the Toronto Industrial Exhibition in 1879. The CNE produced art exhibitions and catalogues annually until 1961, except during and immediately following the Second World War.

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.

The Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour was founded at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto in 1925. Its aim was to recognize and encourage excellence in the medium through exhibitions, competitions, workshops, and symposiums, and to foster communication and camaraderie among watercolour artists. Founding members include Fred Brigden and Group of Seven painters A.J. Casson, Arthur Lismer, and Franklin Carmichael.

An organization launched in 1925 to promote work in watercolour. Founding members included influential figures in the history of Canadian art, such as Franklin Carmichael and C.W. Jefferys. A prestigious group with links to major Canadian art institutions in its early days, it currently manages, along with five other societies, its own gallery in downtown Toronto.

Located in Ottawa and established in 1942, the collection of the national museum of military history originated in the 1880s with militia artifacts. The museum’s collection now includes more than three million military holdings, including 14,000 works that form the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art. In 2005 a newly designed building opened to the public. In addition to several galleries, the museum features a research centre with dedicated a library and archives.

Based in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, the Canadian Women’s Art History Initiative is a resource providing researchers with information on Canadian women artists. The Initiative includes an online database and documentation centre and hosts conferences and other programing, with a focus on the period prior to 1967.

A prolific twentieth-century cartoonist and founder of the National Cartoonists Society. Caniff’s nationally syndicated comic strip Dickie Dare, produced for the Associated Press, led to a position at the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News, where he developed the popular strip Terry and the Pirates.

Born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Cann trained professionally in Montreal, Philadelphia, New York, and parts of Europe, including at the short-lived Harvey-Procter School of Painting in Newlyn, Cornwall, England, and the Académie Julian in Paris, among other art schools. Returning to Yarmouth in 1936, Cann became a member of the Nova Scotia Society of Artists, specializing in portraiture.

Established in 1959, this is the annual release of prints created by artists in the printmaking section of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (now Kinngait Studios). Prints have been distributed in the art market of the South by Dorset Fine Arts, which markets Inuit art to galleries and institutions.

The Italian painter Luigi Capello arrived in Montreal in 1875 after studying in Turin and Rome. It took nearly ten years for him to establish himself, but eventually he began to receive important commissions for murals, portraits, and religious paintings. In contrast to other painters and decorators of the era, Capello had a rich and developed colour palette.

One of the founders of the short-lived Gruppo Origine (1950–51), Capogrossi was a painter who became celebrated for abstract works featuring distinctive comb- and fork-shaped glyphs. After beginning his career as a figurative painter, Capogrossi experimented with shapes, symbols, letters, and numbers before arriving at his definitive style in 1949. With Gruppo Origine and subsequently, he was part of a reaction against more decorative forms of abstraction and sought a return to an essential, rigorous abstract art free of dimensionality and often gestural.

Born in Calgary, Douglas Cardinal is a highly respected Siksika architect who received his degree from the University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his commitment to environmental sustainability, and his buildings—which use curvilinear and organic forms—are inspired by and responsive to nature. The Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau is perhaps his most iconic edifice.

A national non-profit artists’ organization that serves to protect the economic and intellectual property rights of its members and to promote the visual arts in Canada. CARFAC was founded in 1968 by London artists Jack Chambers, Tony Urquhart, and Kim Ondaatje; it currently has around four thousand members.

Most commonly applied to portraiture, caricature distorts or exaggerates characteristic physical features of a subject for comic or critical effect. Perhaps the most celebrated caricaturist was French artist Honoré Daumier.

Opened in 1992, the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) in Ottawa holds a collection of 30,000 works of Canadian, Indigenous, and European art. A public institution and teaching resource, the gallery features a rotation of up to twelve annual exhibitions, nearly one third of which are organized by students.

The sculptor Thomas Carli is a member of the first wave of Italian immigrants who settled in Montreal during the 1860s. A craftsman who knew how to work with several different materials, he opened a workshop in 1867 and accepted commissions for statues and Quebec church decorations.

Major Canadian landscape and figure painter. Carlyle is known for her nuanced and Tonalist-inspired depictions of women. She studied in France with the encouragement of Paul Peel, later moved to New York, travelled extensively throughout Europe, and finally settled in England in 1912. Her work can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Parliament Buildings, and the Woodstock Art Gallery.

A Toronto gallery opened in 1966 by the Italian emigré Carmen Lamanna, a near-mythic figure in the Canadian art scene for more than three decades. The gallery’s stable included many of the most important and cutting-edge artists of its day, from Ron Martin, Ian Carr-Harris, and Paterson Ewen to General Idea and Joanne Tod.

An original member of the Group of Seven, Carmichael created landscapes in watercolour as well as in oil. He was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour. Like so many of his colleagues, he earned his living primarily as a commercial artist and, in 1932, he became head of the Graphic Design and Commercial Art Department at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), Toronto.

A pre-eminent B.C.–based artist and writer, Carr is renowned today for her bold and vibrant images of both the Northwest Coast landscape and its Indigenous peoples. Educated in California, England, and France, she was influenced by a variety of modern art movements but ultimately developed a unique aesthetic style. She was one of the first West Coast artists to achieve national recognition. (See Emily Carr: Life & Work by Lisa Baldissera.)

An Italian painter and author highly influential for his leading role in the Italian Futurist movement of the early twentieth century. After the First World War, he pioneered a new style, termed Metaphysical Painting, alongside painter Giorgio de Chirico. Carrà’s dreamlike exterior scenes featuring symbolic motifs from this period were later highly influential on Surrealism.

A card-mounted photograph, roughly the size and shape of a playing card, produced in multiple using a multi-lens camera. Patented by A.A.E. Disdéri in Paris in 1854, cartes-de-visite were largely intended as photographic calling cards; they depicted sitters according to nearly universal conventions.

An artist and educator based near Grand Valley, Ontario, whose sculptures and drawings have been exhibited across North America and in Australia, Britain, Spain, and China. Educated at York University and the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) in Toronto, Lyn Carter has maintained a studio practice for over forty years and often incorporates textiles in her three-dimensional works.

Originating from the writings of French philosopher René Descartes, Cartesian Rationalism upholds that knowledge can derive from reason and ideas rather than only from empirical evidence and sensory experience.

A French artist and photographer who was one of the first practitioners of candid, observational street photography. Known for his ability to capture spontaneous yet poetic scenes of everyday life, he exclusively shot his images in black and white and was deeply inspired by the Surrealist movement. In 1947, he co-founded Magnum Photos, an international photographic cooperative with headquarters in New York City, Paris, London, and Tokyo.

The art, science, and technology of mapmaking. Cartography involves collecting, processing, and visualizing geographic data. Maps, which are produced through cartographic techniques, are essential tools for navigation and understanding spatial relationships. By visually representing geographic information, cartography influences our perceptions of the world and fosters insights into history, society, and the environment.

A preparatory drawing on paper to assist with the transfer of large images to a wall or canvas. In a cartoon sketch, the drawing would be to scale; this would facilitate an accurate and detailed rendering onto the subsequent surface. An artist would then outline the drawing with pin pricks then mark the holes with powder to replicate the image on the surface.

A milk phosphoprotein, casein is strongly adhesive and commonly employed as glue or as a binding ingredient in paint. Casein paint is used as an alternative to tempera.

Cassatt painted figurative work, often featuring women and children. Her paintings were shown regularly at the Salon in Paris. She was the only American painter officially associated with the French Impressionists.

A comprehensive scholarly listing of an artist’s entire oeuvre, with information including the medium, date, dimensions, provenance, and exhibition history of each artwork. Catalogues raisonnés are indispensable tools for advancing the understanding of individual artists’ life work.

A painter, writer, and traveller passionately devoted to the subject of American Indigenous culture. Hundreds of Catlin’s ethnographic paintings—some of which garnered high praise from contemporary critics, including Charles Baudelaire—are now held by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Cavalier perspective, also called isometric perspective or oblique projection, is a painting or drawing technique that makes use of an elevated point of view, showing objects or scenes from above in a three-dimensional view. The technique is also used in mechanical drawing.

A public institution founded in London in 1896, which offered courses in design and the visual and applied arts initially inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris. In 1989 it merged with Saint Martin’s School of Art to form the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, now part of the University of the Arts London.

The Central Technical School is a composite high school in Toronto that was founded in 1915 to prepare students for the skilled workforce of the modern age. It was the largest school to be built in Canada at the time, reflecting the great demand for technical education. Renowned artists who studied and taught there include Lawren S. Harris, Arthur Lismer, and Elizabeth Wyn Wood.

Originally from Nice, where he had contact with Pierre August Renoir and was a student of Henri Matisse at the Nice School of Art, Cera moved to Canada in 1928 to work as an architectural designer for the T. Eaton Company. Cera was also a painter, and his paintings are owned by institutions in Canada and the United States.

A sculptor associated with Nouveau réalisme, César Baldaccini often used scrap materials, including lead, copper pipe, and metal car parts (as in his controversial sculpture of a crushed automobile, Compression, 1960). In their simplicity, his sculptures of the 1950s and early 1960s are considered to have prefigured Minimalism.

A painter of arguably unparalleled influence on the development of modern art, associated with the Post-Impressionist school and known for his technical experiments with colour and form and his interest in multiple-point perspective. In his maturity, Cézanne had several preferred subjects, including his wife, still life, and Provençal landscapes.

A painter and graphic artist, Chagall’s work is characterized by colourful, dreamlike images and a defiance of the rules of pictorial logic. Although he employed elements of Cubism, Fauvism, and Symbolism, Chagall did not formally align with any avant-garde movement.

A student of George Agnew Reid, Frederick (Fred) Sproston Challener began his career as a lithographer and painter. After travelling in Europe and the Middle East, he began to work as a muralist, working initially through the Toronto Society of Mural Decorators and the Toronto Guild of Civic Art, and collaborating with artists including C.W. Jefferys. He later received numerous theatre commissions, including for the murals decorating the interior of Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre.

The daughter of the writer Susanna Moodie, Agnes Dunbar Moodie was a watercolour painter of Canadian flora. In 1869 she published Canadian Wild Flowers, a book of her lithographs of wildflowers accompanied by text by her aunt, Catharine Parr Traill. She married twice: first to Charles Thomas FitzGibbon in 1850, who died in 1865, and then to Brown Chamberlin in 1870.

A London, Ontario, painter and avant-garde filmmaker, whose meditative paintings typically depict domestic subjects, Chambers was committed to regionalism, despite the international outlook he developed during five years of artistic training in Madrid. He was one of the founders of CARFAC, Canada’s artists’ rights protection agency. (See Jack Chambers: Life & Work by Mark Cheetham.)

A Hamilton-born photographer who in 1977 founded the Toronto Photographers’ Co-operative (now Gallery TPW), a major artist-run centre devoted to exhibiting photography, film, and video. Two years prior, Chambers helped found the artist-run centre Hamilton Artists Inc, and frequently exhibited his street photography and mixed-media works there. He was a professor in the Creative Photography department at Humber College for twenty years.

A Jamaican-born, Toronto-based artist who explores the diversity of the human form—particularly the Black body—in his black and white photography and gum bichromate images. Michael Chambers was the subject of the touring solo exhibition Shadows to Silver: A 25 Year Retrospective, 2017–19. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at Toronto’s York University. Chambers has mentored young artists at Don Mills Collegiate Institute for over two decades and served as an art instructor at the University of Toronto’s Camera Club.

Ruth Chambers is an artist and scholar renowned for her meticulously detailed ceramic sculptures and installations based on botanical and other subjects examining the still life genre, the body, medicine, and architecture. She is also a longtime professor at the University of Regina.

Montreal-born sculptor known for working with raw, unvarnished wood and pine planks in gesture-oriented processes. From 1966 to 1969 Champagne studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal with Ulysse Comtois and Henry Saxe. Champagne assisted Françoise Sullivan with the realization of her work La légende des artistes for the major project Corridart, on Sherbrooke Street, as part of the 1976 Olympic Games held in Montreal.

A Northern Ontario–based mixed-media artist who fuses computer-manipulated images, painting, drawing, and printmaking, Chapman conjures images from storytelling to explore culture and identity in his work.

A French painter renowned for his genre scenes and still lifes. His lowly subject matter was at odds with the Rococo style that prevailed in the Paris of his day, yet he was a star of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and his works were in high demand around Europe. Chardin never left Paris; his knowledge of art derived solely from what he was able to see in his city.

Based in Toronto, Hector Charlesworth was a journalist, critic, editor, and memoirist who wrote primarily about music and drama. He gained renown for criticizing the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa for what he saw as its preferential treatment of the Group of Seven. From 1932 to 1936 he served as the first head of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, the precursor to the CBC.

An American Impressionist painter influenced by both the Old Masters and Édouard Manet, Chase was known as a charismatic art teacher who taught, among others, Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper at the Art Students League in New York. He often painted portraits, domestic scenes, New York City parks, and still lifes. He established the Chase School, now called Parsons School of Design.

The principal Montreal residence of industrialist Oscar Dufresne, constructed between 1915 and 1918 by Dufresne and his brother, the architect and engineer Marius Dufresne. The château is a grand house in the Beaux-Arts style, noted for its paintings, murals, and stained glass executed by master craftsperson Guido Nincheri (1885–1973). It is one of the few secular works by the renowned church decorator. After major restoration work, the building was reopened in 2014 as the Dufresne-Nincheri Museum.

Built from 1892 and inaugurated in 1893 in Quebec City’s Upper Town, this landmark hotel was commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway and designed by Bruce Price in the Châteauesque style. The railway company constructed the hotel to boost tourism and rail travel to Old Quebec, where it remains a prominent feature of the historic district.

A Jesuit priest, artist, author, and teacher of mathematics born in Aquitaine. By 1677 Chauchetière had arrived in New France to do missionary work; he spent sixteen years at La Prairie, working to convert Iroquois peoples and serving as pastor to French families.

A painter and prominent member of the Woodland School. Influenced by modern abstract movements and known for his spare representations of birds and animals, Chee Chee painted in a style more abstract and graphic than that of his Woodland School contemporaries.

A well-known B.C. portrait painter, Cheney was the first staff medical artist at the University of British Columbia, creating anatomical images for the Faculty of Medicine from 1951 to 1962. She moved to Vancouver in 1937. Cheney met and corresponded with many Canadian artists and enjoyed a close friendship with Emily Carr in the period before Carr’s work gained general acceptance. She collected material about Carr until December 1979. Her correspondence with artists has been collected in Dear Nan: Letters from Emily Carr, Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms, ed. Doreen Walker (1990).

A chemist whose work on colour perception had a great impact on the development of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism at the end of the nineteenth century. Chevreul’s hypotheses arose from his observations as director of the Gobelins dye-works in Paris.

A term that refers, at its most general, to an artist’s use of light and dark and the visual effects thus produced in a painting, engraving, or drawing. Chiaroscuro can serve to create atmosphere, describe volume, and imitate natural light effects. From the Italian chiaro (light) and scuro (dark).

A painter, sculptor, and educator, and an important feminist artist and intellectual. Chicago explores the role of women in art history and contemporary culture. Her best-known work, The Dinner Party, 1974–79, commemorates thirty-nine historically significant women with specially designed place settings for each one at a vast triangular table.

A European style of art and decoration that is an interpretation and imitation of Chinese and other East Asian arts. Related to Orientalism, which is the generalizing and patronizing view of non-Western cultures, chinoiserie first appeared in the seventeenth century. The style is characteristic of Asian motifs, including stereotypical Asian figures, pagodas, animals, extensive gilding, lacquering, and blue-and-white decoration typical in porcelain.

Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico influenced the development of Surrealism with his metaphysical paintings of largely deserted squares and buildings casting long shadows under bright sunlight. Completed between 1909 and 1919, these dreamlike scenes were groundbreaking for their representation of how the mind perceives reality. To the dismay of the Surrealists, de Chirico later abandoned his metaphysical works in favour of Neoclassical and Neo-Baroque painting.

Los Angeles-based art dealer Douglas Chrismas has worked with many esteemed artists, including Gathie Falk. At seventeen years old, Chrismas opened Douglas Gallery in Vancouver, which became a centre where Vancouver artists could show their work alongside famous New York artists, such as Donald Judd and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1967 Chrismas opened a Los Angeles location, renamed as Ace Gallery.

An artist known for collaborating with his wife and fellow artist, Jeanne-Claude, to create large scale, site-specific environmental installations. Typically, they wrapped or draped fabric to transform architectural monuments or landmarks. They initially worked together under Christo’s name before crediting their work as “Christo and Jeanne-Claude.”

A colour lithograph, popular from the mid-nineteenth century for book illustrations and print portfolios. Chromolithographs were produced through the use of numerous lithographic stones, each of which was inked with one of the colours needed for the final print.

A photographic technique that records a sequence of movements in a single photographic image. Chronophotography was invented in the early 1880s by French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey to aid in the study of the anatomical movement of humans and animals. The technique influenced Futurist painters, notably Giacomo Balla, who replicated the effect in the painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912.

One of Regina’s most celebrated clay artists, Victor Cicansky grew up in an Eastern European neighbourhood strongly shaped his ceramics, notably his incorporation of fruits and vegetables. He studied at the University of California, Davis, before returning to Regina to teach at the University of Saskatchewan. He later embraced bronze and was the subject of a 2019 MacKenzie Art Gallery retrospective.

A mixed-media artist interested in the continual cycle of life and death, humanity’s relationship to nature, and the sense of a primordial place where the self can be reborn. Cisneros’s works often feature bones, animal pelts, and driftwood. Before immigrating to Canada from Mexico in 1969, Cisneros founded an art movement called La Rabia (“Rage”). In the 1970s he taught at Manitou College in La Macaza, Quebec.

City Beautiful was a reform movement and philosophy in North American urban planning in the 1890s to 1920s. It sought to organize cities and improve them through beautification, which included harmonious architecture, grand boulevards, and large public spaces like parks that would foster civic pride.

A landscape and figure painter, Clapp was influenced by the emphasis on light effects in Impressionism, the detailed and mottled brushwork of Pointillism, and the bold colours of Fauvism. Born in Montreal to American parents, he studied in Paris and Madrid before settling first in Montreal and then in Oakland, California. Clapp served as curator and director of the Oakland Art Gallery for over thirty years and exhibited often with the California Society of Six.

A Harlem-raised, Toronto-based artist whose often-autobiographical work crosses the boundaries between photography, sculpture, and collage. June Clark has maintained a studio practice since the 1970s. Having earned international recognition, her work has been featured in exhibitions in North America, South America, and Europe, and is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

An outspoken painter who advocated for the social role of the artist and Canadian and Russian cultural ties, Clark arrived in Toronto via Paris in 1931. Her subjects were still lifes, self-portraits, landscapes, and memories of her Russian home. Clark supported fundraising efforts for Spanish refugees during the Spanish Civil War and for the Canadian Aid to Russia Fund in 1942. (See Paraskeva Clark: Life & Work by Christine Boyanoski.)

Although remembered largely for his leading role in the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Northwest (1803–6), Clark served as an Indian Affairs agent for over thirty years. As the U.S. government’s representative to nearly all the tribes in the West, he negotiated treaties and supervised numerous land cessions.

An important figure in American avant-garde cinema in the 1950s, and one of the New York scene’s few women filmmakers. In the 1960s Clarke pursued social concerns with her documentary filmmaking; her 1967 film Portrait of Jason is considered a watershed in the history of LGBT film.

A painter of rural landscapes and peasant life, Clausen was a proponent of British Impressionism and a co-founder of the New English Art Club in 1886. He believed in bringing reform to the stiff traditional style of the Royal Academy of Arts, where he taught from 1904 to 1906. He served as a war artist during the First World War and was knighted in 1927.

Invented by the artist Thomas Wilfred in 1919, the Clavilux was a kind of organ that allowed a performer to use a keyboard to project light through a system of lenses and coloured screens onto a dark background in order to “play” Wilfred’s light compositions (lumia). Originally designed for cinematic performances, later models were intended for home use and included a smaller, boxed screen to display the lumia.

A pre-eminent graphic designer and typographer, he worked for Cooper & Beatty Typographers, as well as The Font Shop in Toronto, which he created with Eric Spiekermann to distribute digital fonts in the 1990s.

The son of the owner of a respected Paris foundry, Clementi apprenticed in Italy as well as in Paris before entering his father’s profession in the 1930s. With the sculptors Rosaline Granet and Jacques Delahaye, he established the art foundry Fonderie Berjac in Meudon, France, in 1959. He became its sole proprietor in 1963, at which point he changed its name to Fonderie Clementi. Turriddu’s son Gilbert in turn succeeded him in the business; the foundry continues to specialize in art casting and the lost-wax process, completing commissions for both small- and large-scale projects.

Born in Lancashire, England, Clemesha set up an architectural practice in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the early 1900s and during the First World War served as a lieutenant in the 46th Infantry Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Resuming work as an architect after the war, he was the runner-up in the competition organized by Canadian Battlefields Memorial Commission to design First World War memorials in France and Belgium. His design, known as The Brooding Soldier, was unveiled in July 1923 at St. Julien, Belgium, marking the site of the first large scale gas attack during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.

A watercolourist and oil painter whose practice spanned almost forty years. Clench’s preferred subjects were landscapes, flowers, and figures. She assisted her husband, Paul Kane, in organizing his field sketches for an exhibition at Toronto City Hall in 1848. In 1849 she participated in the Upper Canada Provincial Exhibition.

An artist widely renowned for his enormous Photorealist portraits, created through a painstaking process that involves breaking up his subject into gridded increments and then methodically recreating it on canvas. In addition to painting he has mastered an array of printmaking and photographic techniques.

A largely self-taught artist known for his Canadian landscapes, Cloutier was part of the Montreal-based “Oxford Group” of artists, named for the tavern they frequented, and regularly painted with contemporaries A.Y. Jackson and Edwin Holgate. During the Second World War, Cloutier was Art Director for the Wartime Information Board in 1941, and from 1943 to 1946 he was the only francophone official Canadian war artist, serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Established in 1965 and housed in a coach house in downtown Toronto, this printing press is also a long-standing independent Canadian publisher, primarily known for its printing business and its fiction and poetry. Michael Ondaatje, Andre Alexis, Anne Michaels, Christian Bök, and Guy Maddin are prominent Canadian writers who have been published by the press.

An original member of the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., Cobiness was associated with the Woodland School and is noted for having signed his paintings with his nation’s treaty number (47). Early in his career he painted realistic scenes of outdoor life and nature. His later work tended toward the abstract.

Known as “the Coen brothers,” this sibling duo has written, directed, and produced some of the most widely admired and commercially successful films in contemporary cinema, including Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), and No Country for Old Men (2007). They work across genres and often with the same actors.

A neighbourhood at the southern tip of Manhattan, Coenties Slip was the last of New York City’s seventeenth-century shipping slips to be filled in and reclaimed by the city. In the 1950s, the former industrial area attracted a loose group of artists including Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Robert Indiana. They lived and worked in the Coenties lofts, offering mutual support as they sought to separate themselves from Abstract Expressionism, laying the foundations of Pop art and Minimalism. The area has since been redeveloped and is now part of New York’s financial district.

A painter and mixed-media sculptor known for his use of monumental structures, brightly painted steel, and totem pole forms combined with modernist abstraction. Spirituality is essential to Coffin’s artistic practice. He has taught at many institutions, including the Institute of American Indian Arts, New Mexico.

An American-born photographer who lived and worked in Canada from 1973 until her death in 2014, Cohen was internationally renowned for her photographs of interior, often institutional, spaces. The National Gallery of Canada organized a retrospective of her work in 2002. She was a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2005.

A leading American landscape painter of the nineteenth century and founder of the Hudson River School. Born in England, Cole emigrated with his family to the United States when he was seventeen. After training as a portrait painter, he turned his attention to the scenery around the Catskill and Adirondack mountains. Cole imbued his landscapes with drama, romanticism, and idealism.

Based in Toronto, William Colgate was an art critic, book historian, and art collector. He was also one of the first art historians to focus on Canadian art. In 1943, Colgate published Canadian Art: Its Origin and Development, a foundational text for the discipline and, at the time, only the third volume to appear on the subject of Canadian art.

Collage can be solely photographic or use a variety of pre-existing materials, including paper, fabric, glass, newspaper and magazine clippings, prints, and painting attached together on a single backing sheet and sometimes added to with pastes, paints, and textured materials.

A printmaking technique popularized by American printmaker and art educator Glen Alps in the 1950s, collagraphy involves affixing three-dimensional objects to a rigid material, often a piece of cardboard. The textured surface created by the objects becomes the basis for a print—it can be inked and pressed by hand or in a printing press. Collagraphs can be used to create either relief prints, in which the upper surfaces of the plate are inked, or intaglio prints, in which ink is worked into the whole plate and then removed from the upper surface so that the print will draw pigment from the spaces between objects.

Having trained in Fine Art at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), Collins went on to become a well-respected cartoonist for the Montreal Gazette for over forty years. He is known for creating Uno Who, a recurring character representing the Canadian taxpayer that first appeared in his cartoons in 1940. During the Second World War, Collins created popular cartoons on the war effort, several of which were reprinted in the New York Times.

A collection of ideas and concepts—scientific, philosophical, and psychological—related to human perception of colour. For centuries, painters have looked to colour theory for practical guidance on how to create specific effects in their works, and several modern art movements, including Pointillism, Orphism, and Synchronism, are rooted in specific theories of colour.

A term first used to describe Abstract Expressionist works that use simplified or minimalist forms of flat or nuanced colour, as in paintings by Morris Louis. It was later applied to works by such artists as Kenneth Noland and Barnett Newman in the United States and Jack Bush in Canada, whose geometric or abstract motifs highlight variations in colour. Post-Painterly Abstraction, a description coined by the critic Clement Greenberg, includes colour-field painting.

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.)

A major figure in twentieth-century Canadian art, who began his career as a commercial artist. He took up painting in his twenties, and became a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour and the Canadian Group of Painters. Comfort served as director of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from 1959 to 1965.

A Nova Scotian painter who is known as the first native-born professional painter in the province. He mainly painted commissioned portraits and landscapes in a neoclassical style. He offered lessons in drawing and painting and lived and worked in various towns throughout Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, including Fredericton, Saint John, and Halifax.

Refers to artworks, often in the form of sculptural installations, which are made through the use, assemblage, or manipulation of commercially manufactured objects and mass-produced goods.

A photographic negative made by combining several negatives. Composite negatives were largely a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, when technological limitations made it impossible to capture different areas of a particular scene—such as sea and sky—at once.

Created by photographers using a cut-and-paste technique, primarily in the nineteenth century—when exposure times were long and outdoor photography was difficult—composite photographs were a means of guaranteeing that each figure in a group photograph was sharp, visible, well posed, and had a pleasing facial expression.

Louis Comtois was a Montreal-born abstract painter whose work, often juxtaposing rectangular panels of different sizes and colours, shows the influence of the Montreal Plasticiens as well as hard-edge painting. He moved from Montreal to New York City in 1972, switching from acrylics to oils and encaustic in the 1980s and adding experimentations in texture and surface treatment to his primary concern with colour.

Traced to the work of Marcel Duchamp but not codified until the 1960s, “Conceptual art” is a general term for art that emphasizes ideas over form. The finished product may even be physically transient, as with land art or performance art.

In 1945 the first Grand Prize in Painting was awarded in the Quebec Provincial Art Competition, held annually until 1970 (though some years were missed). The competition included an annual exhibition at the Musée de la province de Québec (today the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec). The regulations required that the artworks that won first prizes in painting, sculpture, and decorative arts were purchased for the museum’s collection.

A Hamilton-born, Toronto-based artist who has collaborated with artistic partner Karl Beveridge since the late 1960s. Initially part of the Conceptual art movement, in the 1970s Condé and Beveridge began exploring socio-political issues in their work. Collaborating with trade unions and community organizations, they create staged photographic series to explore the relationship of paid labour to environmental issues, human rights, and class divisions.

Located in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, the Confederation Centre of the Arts is a musical theatre, visual arts, and heritage venue. Founded in 1964 to commemorate the Charlottetown Conference of 1864, it is Canada’s official memorial to the Fathers of Confederation. Its theatre is the home of the Charlottetown Festival and its art gallery holds a collection of over 16,000 works by contemporary and historic Canadian artists.

A conference organized by the painter André Biéler in 1941 in Kingston, Ontario, attended by some 150 visual artists, writers, poets, and others interested in the arts in Canada. Among those present were Lawren Harris, Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Arthur Lismer, Alma Duncan, F.R. Scott, Miller Brittain, Walter Abell, A.Y. Jackson, and the American painter Thomas Hart Benton. Based on Biéler’s recommendation for a national federation of artists and on other initiatives of the conference, the Federation of Canadian Artists was set up; the visual arts magazine Canadian Art was launched; and in 1957 the Canada Council for the Arts was created.

Born in Kingston, Ontario, Connolly enlisted with the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1950, where he logged over 4,000 flying hours as a navigator. After leaving the air force, he worked as a professional artist for more than two decades and played an important role in the formation of the Canadian Aviation Artists Association.

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Viewed today, along with J.M.W. Turner, as one of the greatest British landscape and sky painters of the nineteenth century. Constable painted mostly in his native region of Suffolk and the surrounding areas. He took a more expressive approach to his paintings than many of his predecessors and contemporaries.

Constructivism was an artistic movement founded in Russia in 1915 by artists Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Associated with Soviet Socialism, it championed a materialist, utilitarian approach to art and linked art to design, industry, and social purpose. The term continues to be used generally to describe abstract art that employs lines, planes, and other visual elements in composing geometric images of a precise and impersonal nature.

Also referred to as contact prints or contact proofs, contact sheets contain positive prints of negatives from a roll of film, in the same size as they appear in the film roll. The purpose of a contact sheet is to provide the photographer with visuals of all of the images on a roll of film at once, so that a selection can be made for which images to develop and enlarge.

Founded in 1939 by John Lyman, this Montreal-based society promoted a non-academic approach to modernist art and linked artistic culture in Quebec to contemporary life. Early members included Stanley Cosgrove, Paul-Émile Borduas, and Jack Humphrey.

A painter of genre scenes and figures known for his exquisite draftsmanship. His work is characterized by intense colours and graceful figures. He trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Florence, where he lived throughout his life.

Italian term meaning “counterpose,” used to describe the uneven distribution of weight of a human body in an artwork. Contrapposto originates with the ancient Greeks as a sculptural characteristic to make figures appear less rigid and more naturally relaxed. In this pose, figures have their weight on one foot so that the body twists to form a slight “S” shape.

A portraitist and landscape painter known for her depictions of women in interior settings, Coonan was the only member of the Beaver Hall Group who did not belong to the established Montreal art scene or exhibit widely with them. Her later works show Impressionist and modernist influences with simplified backgrounds and expressive brushwork prioritized over realistic capture.

The son of history and genre painter Charles West Cope, Arthur Cope was a portraitist and an arts educator. He most notably painted portraits of public and royal figures, including Kings Edward VII and George V. Cope was appointed a fellow of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1900, elected to the Royal Academician in 1910, and knighted in 1917.

Federal statute protecting “every original literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic work” from unlawful reproduction. First passed in 1921, when it was modelled on the British Copyright Act of 1911, the Act has since been amended three times, with new technology among the chief reasons for reform.

An abstract painter, Edward Corbett created landscape-like compositions in shades of pale blue, bluish pink, and black. While painting, showing, and teaching in San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s, he spent summers in the artists’ communities of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Taos, New Mexico. In 1952, Corbett was included in the exhibition 15 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. 

Psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and Automatiste poet, Cormier was a pioneer of forensic psychiatry and clinical criminology in Canada. He was a signatory of the 1948 artistic manifesto Refus global, which protested the rigid religious and ideological traditions of Quebec. Cormier’s contribution, an article titled “A Pictorial Work Is an Experiment and an Experience,” encouraged the consideration of multiple fluid perspectives in approaching art, including that of the artist as well as the viewer and interpreter.

Ernest Cormier was an architect and engineer. He studied architecture in Europe and returned to Montreal to promote modern art among a close circle of artists affiliated with the magazine Le Nigog. He designed the new campus for the Université de Montréal (1924–43), the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa (1938–50), and the Grand Seminary of Quebec (1957–60). In his buildings, one finds a unique intersection between Beaux-Arts sensibilities and the new principles of modernism.

Although known today as a landscape painter—among the most influential of the nineteenth century—and the leading member of the Barbizon school of French nature painters, Corot rose to prominence in his own time for the Romantic tableaux he exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon.

A Toronto artist in the 1950s and graduate of the Ontario College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design University). William Coryell attended a “summer school for painting” run by fellow artist Bert Weir in Parry Sound, Ontario, in the mid-1950s.

A painter, fresco artist, and draftsman who returned repeatedly to the same few subjects and genres over his seventy-year career, particularly forests, women, and still lifes. In the 1940s he studied in Mexico City and apprenticed with the celebrated muralist José Clemente Orozco, an experience that would have a lasting impact on Cosgrove’s style.

Born in Ottawa, Coughlin worked as a cartoonist during the Second World War while serving as a sergeant with the Canadian Army’s 4th Princess Louise Dragoon Guards. His wartime cartoons featuring “Herbie” remain notable representations of the shared everyday experiences of Canadian soldiers.

An influential painter and teacher known for his conceptual use of colour, expressive brushwork, and abstract representations of the human figure. Coughtry’s first exhibition was with Michael Snow in 1955; he went on to represent Canada at the Bienal de São Paulo of 1959 and the Venice Biennale of 1960.

A critical figure in nineteenth-century art, Courbet helped establish the Realist movement, with paintings such as Burial at Ornans, 1849–50, and The Painter’s Studio, 1855, and paved the way for later artists, including the Impressionists, to abandon classical subjects for those they encountered in their daily lives.

A painter trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), Toronto, and the latter’s first female student. Inspired by the Group of Seven and Hans Hoffman, she frequently painted landscapes and farms, but also worked in an abstract mode. Courtice was a member of associations, including the Royal Canadian Academy and the Federation of Canadian Artists; a solo exhibition of her work was held at Victoria College, Toronto, in 1951.

A painter in the Academic style, Gustave Courtois trained at the École des beaux-arts in Paris and taught at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He maintained a studio with Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, a fellow painter.

The Dominican father Marie-Alain Couturier was a French painter and glassmaker educated at Sacred Art Workshops, a school created in 1919 to encourage the production of a modern and accessible sacred art. A fervent critic of academism, Couturier supported the place of contemporary artists in the religious field. From 1940 to 1945 he lived in North America and taught in Montreal and Baltimore.

In 1941, Cowley-Brown enlisted with the Royal Canadian Air Force, training as a wireless air gunner. After becoming ill overseas, he was stationed at Rockcliffe air base in Ottawa from 1942 to 1944, producing artwork among other duties and forming relationships with artists Edwin Holgate and Charles Goldhamer. Cowley-Brown became an official war artist in May 1944, and his subjects include servicemen, military equipment, and scenes of military life on Canada’s west coast.

A small shell, called the megis in the Anishinaabe tradition. The cowrie shell is an important symbol in Anishinaabe legends and is thought of as a source of strength and healing.

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An innovative theatre designer and theorist, Craig emphasized movement and lighting in his designs. He created stage sets that used movable parts and abstract forms, evoking the audience’s emotional response through atmosphere rather than representation and verisimilitude. Craig’s writing influenced the non-naturalistic movement in modern theatre.

Originally from Alert Bay, B.C., Cranmer learned to carve while working with the artist Naka’pankam (Mungo Martin). In 1959 he began working with Bill Reid to build the Haida Village, now at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. While Cranmer is best known for his carvings, he also created paintings and prints.

The daughter of artist Sarah, Lady Crease, Josephine Crease was a watercolourist known for her paintings of the British Columbian landscape. She was among the founders of the British Columbia-based Island Arts and Crafts Society and served as its president in 1939.

A British-born painter who immigrated to Canada in 1848. Travelling extensively throughout the country, William Cresswell earned renown for his oil and watercolour landscapes and coastal scenes. His work influenced the early careers of fellow artists Robert Ford Gagen and George Agnew Reid.

Dancer, teacher, and choreographer who founded the first official ballet company in Quebec, Les Ballets-Québec, active from 1948 to 1951. During the Second World War, Crevier was posted to England and studied with Phyllis Bedells at London’s Royal Academy of Dance during his leaves. He taught in Montreal at the Shefler School of Dancing, the Berkeley Hotel, and his own studio, where his students included Aline Legris, Françoise Sullivan, and Andrée Millaire.

Professor of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, Douglas Crimp was a critic and art historian associated with the emergence of postmodernism and the New York art world of the 1970s. He wrote extensively on postmodern practice, including the work of both artists and curators in his understanding of its place in a larger cultural context. As a result of his work on the relationships between gay life, the AIDS crisis, and contemporary art in New York City, Crimp became a pioneering figure in queer studies.

A Scottish-born educator and portrait, figure, and scene painter who immigrated to Canada in 1871. William Cruikshank was a long-time instructor at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), Toronto. Many painters who themselves became notable and influential Canadian artists studied under Cruikshank, including Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, J.E.H. MacDonald, and, it seems, Tom Thomson too.

A radical style of painting developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914, Cubism is defined by the representation of numerous perspectives at once. Cubism is considered crucial to the history of modern art for its enormous international impact; famous practitioners also include Juan Gris and Francis Picabia.

Like many Canadian painters of his generation, Maurice Cullen received his early art education in Montreal, then moved to Paris to continue his studies at the Académie Julian, the Académie Colarossi, and the École des beaux-arts. He was influenced by Impressionism, and his landscapes, in turn, influenced a younger generation of Canadian painters, including the Group of Seven. His winter landscapes and snowy urban scenes are considered his most impressive achievement.

An artist and educator whose technical mastery extends to photography, printmaking, painting, and sculpture. Among his best-known works are photographs of his own conceptual drawings and constructions—intellectually layered, witty works that refer to science and art history. He has taught art at universities around the United States since the 1960s.

Illustrator, painter, and professional boxer who studied with James McNeill Whistler in Paris (and partly paid for those studies by teaching boxing). Cuneo contributed illustrations to Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories, completed commissioned paintings for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1908, and depicted war subjects during the First World War.

An adjective meaning of or containing copper, “cupric” is often associated in chemistry with “oxide” and refers specifically to substances containing copper with a valence of two.

A carver of steatite sculptures of Arctic animals who learned his art form at the age of six from Qaqaq Ashoona. With his cousin Joe Ashoona, Koomuatuk Sapa Curley represents a new generation of artists engaged with traditional Inuit forms and materials.

A central figure in London regionalism from the 1960s to the early 1990s, Curnoe was a painter, printmaker, and graphic artist who found inspiration in his life and his Southwestern Ontario surroundings. His wide-ranging art interests included Surrealism, Dada, Cubism, and the work of many individual artists, both historical and contemporary. (See Greg Curnoe: Life & Work by Judith Rodger.)

A painter, printmaker, and ceramic artist who is best known for her depictions of the Haliburton Highlands in Ontario. Curry studied under various members of the Group of Seven and eventually taught art at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario).

A Kansas-born illustrator, painter, and lithographer of academic genre scenes and landscapes inspired by his Midwestern home. Along with artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Curry epitomized American regionalism of the 1930s and 1940s.

A commercial photographer known for his portraits of Native Americans, which he published in the twenty-volume North American Indian between 1907 and 1930. More Pictorialist than documentary, these images often recorded customs and costumes that had already vanished from the cultures depicted.

An influential Prince Albert-born feminist artist and teacher, Ruth Cuthand explores issues such as the damage of colonization and ongoing Indigenous/settler relations through printmaking, painting/drawing, and beading known for its political anger, humour, and a thoughtful crudeness. A retrospective of her work toured Canada from 2011 to 2014.

Born in Yorkshire and educated in London, Gertrude Spurr Cutts exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists and the Society of Women Artists before immigrating to Canada in 1890. She became a member of the Ontario Society of Artists and an active member of the Toronto art scene, maintaining a studio and participating in numerous exhibitions.

An iron-based process for positive printing invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842. Cyanotypes are slow-reacting, highly sensitive to light, and result in prints in a hue reminiscent of Prussian blue. The process was taken up primarily by botanical illustrators such as Anna Atkins, one of the first women photographers and the author of the first book containing photographic illustrations, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843).

A multidisciplinary movement that arose in Europe in response to the horrors of the First World War, whose adherents aimed to deconstruct and demolish traditional societal values and institutions. Artworks, often collages and ready-mades, typically scorned fine materials and craftsmanship. Chief Dadaists include Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, and Hans Arp.

A French Naturalist painter, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret was known for his Breton paintings, including numerous representations of Breton women in traditional dress. He maintained a Paris studio with Gustave Courtois.

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.

A large-scale sculptor and installation artist influenced by Joseph Beuys and Italian Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, Dahlem is known for works that combine wood and light to consider the cosmos, philosophy, and concepts of space and matter. He is interested in the fragile conditions of human knowledge and often incorporates ordinary materials, like bottles of milk or wine, into his sculptures to reimagine an understanding of the world and the universe.

A distinguished Canadian designer, Carl Dair was also an internationally recognized typographer, teacher, and writer. He believed in typography as a significant feature of communication and designed Cartier, the first Canadian typeface. His influential book, Design with Type, was published in 1952.

A Spanish artist and influential member of the Surrealist movement, Salvador Dalí is best known for his provocative, heavily symbolic, dreamlike imagery drawn from the subconscious mind as well as his meticulous attention to detail. The Persistence of Memory, 1931, by Dali, with its melting clock faces, remains one of the twentieth century’s most parodied artworks.

A painter and illustrator known for his brightly coloured works featuring fantastical characters. Born in Hull, Quebec, Jean-Philippe Dallaire worked in Ottawa before setting off to study in Paris, where he met and was greatly influenced by the Canadian artist Alfred Pellan. From 1940–44 he was interned by the Gestapo. Dallaire later taught at the École des beaux-arts in Quebec City and worked as an illustrator at the National Film Board in Ottawa.

British-born Frederick Dally is best known for his 1860s landscape photographs of Gold Rush-era British Columbia, including sights like the Cariboo Wagon Road and the town of Barkerville, which were widely reproduced and circulated. While he was highly respected for these photographs and his work in other genres, he sold his photography gallery and returned to England in 1870. 

Originally an abstract painter, Ken Danby began creating the realistically rendered, posed images of Canadian life and landscapes for which he became known in 1962. His media include egg tempera, watercolour, oil, and acrylic. Paintings featuring athletes, including At the Crease, 1972, an ice-level portrait of anonymous hockey goalie in full pads, typify Danby’s work. 

An artist, sculptor, educator, and a founding member of Le Retable, a group of artists dedicated to promoting religious art standards in Quebec’s Catholic churches. Among Sylvia Daoust’s most notable works is the bronze statue of Brother Marie-Victorin at the Montreal Botanical Garden, commissioned in 1951.

After training in Britain, Darling developed a successful architectural practice in Toronto, specializing in churches, bank branches, and other public buildings. His most notable projects include the Royal Ontario Museum, Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto, the Winnipeg Grain and Produce Exchange, and Walker Court at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

A modernist painter who was influenced by Paul Cézanne and Cubism. Dasburg taught Kathleen Munn when she attended the Art Students League summer school in Woodstock, New York.

Daubigny was a naturalistic landscape painter and one of the earliest promoters in France of plein air painting. Although closely associated with the Barbizon school, a group of artists who lived and painted outdoors in the forest of Fontainebleau, he was more dedicated to river scenery than to forest interiors. His interest in the depiction of light and its reflections made him a precursor of Impressionism. He was also an important supporter of Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.

An art critic, writer, and artist, Gary Michael Dault has written extensively on the work of Canadian artists, including reviews, catalogues, gallery guides, and monographs. From the 1970s he covered the Toronto art scene, including a decade-long column, Gallery Going, which appeared in the Globe and Mail Saturday edition. Gault was awarded the Order of Canada in 2018 for his work bringing art to a wide public.

A prominent artist in politically tumultuous nineteenth-century Paris, known primarily as a satirist. Daumier’s published drawings and lithographs viciously mocked political figures and the bourgeoisie, for which he was jailed for six months in 1832–33. He also helped develop the genre of caricature sculpture.

A Neoclassical painter regarded as the preeminent painter of the late eighteenth century. David is best known for his large-scale history paintings, such as Oath of the Horatii, 1784, although he was also a gifted portraitist. A prominent figure in the French Revolution of 1789 because of his involvement in politics, David completed only one oil painting during this period, The Death of Marat, 1793, a famous work from the unfinished series The Martyrs of the Revolution.

Having decided to become an artist at a young age, David spent many years studying Nuu-chah-nulth art in museums and universities as well as within his community. In the mid-1970s he worked with Bill Reid, and he has since gone on to create monumental public sculptures of his own in addition to smaller carvings and works on paper.

A Toronto-based painter of large, emotionally intense canvases who often uses a reduced palette dominated by black and white, recalling the abstraction of Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler.

Younger brother of the Haida artist Robert Davidson (Guud San Glans), Davidson is a noted carver who creates jewellery, masks, musical instruments, and prints as well as sculptures. He also sings and dances with the Rainbow Creek Dance Group, a group that he and his brother established in 1980, for which he creates ceremonial regalia. 

A celebrated carver of totem poles and masks, painter, printmaker, and jeweller, Davidson is recognized for reviving and perpetuating various aspects of Haida art and cultural expression. In 1969, at the age of twenty-two, he carved a totem pole in his hometown of Masset, British Columbia, which became the first to be raised there in ninety years. In 2010, he received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts.

Originally a commercial artist, Emma Lu Davis began to create sculptures influenced by global folk art traditions in the 1930s. She traveled to China and the Soviet Union, and was artist-in-residence at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, from 1938 to 1941. Davis was included in Dorothy Miller’s exhibition Americans 1942 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1965 she completed a doctorate in archeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, becoming a pioneering researcher of the early histories of Indigenous cultures in the Californian desert.

A Washington, D.C.-born artist who was closely associated with the Color Field movement of abstract painting. He was best known for his energetic stripe paintings that featured vertical lines of interchanging colours. In 1972, he created what was at the time the world’s largest artwork, by painting the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He taught at the Corcoran School of Art and served as the commissioner of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

One of the most renowned Haida artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Daxhiigang is known for creating extraordinary argillite carvings, silver bracelets, and, with his wife, Isabella Edenshaw, woven baskets and hats. Highly innovative, his works draw on Haida traditions while responding to modern colonialism. 

A Jesuit priest and linguist who arrived in New France in 1625. He worked to convert the Montagnais, Huron, and Iroquois peoples over the next two decades, eventually learning the Huron language and creating a Huron grammar and dictionary. He was killed by the Iroquois in 1649 and canonized in 1930.

Although a prominent Abstract Expressionist, de Kooning was not concerned with strict abstraction—figures appear in the dense and riotous brushwork that characterizes much of his work. Among his most famous works are those of the Women series, first exhibited in 1953 to much critical scorn.

Constant de l’Aubinière was a painter and an arts lecturer. He and his artist wife Georgina de l’Aubinière travelled to North America in 1882, where they painted and lectured across the United States and Canada. In 1887, the couple were commissioned to create fourteen paintings for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee

A painter working primarily with watercolours, Georgina de l’Aubinière was the daughter of artist John Steeple. She studied both in England and France, and she exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England. She travelled to North America with her husband, fellow artist Constant de l’Aubinière. There, the couple painted landscapes—including those of British Columbia—operated an art studio, and lectured artists such as Josephine Crease.

An Art Deco painter, primarily of portraits of those in her circle of artists and socialites. Her work is known for its precise lines, elegance, and decadence. De Lempicka, who emigrated from Russia to Paris and later to the United States, was also famed for her glamour, parties, and unconventional romantic relationships.

De Staël is recognized for a large number of abstract landscapes that make heavy use of colour blocks, intense hues, and thick impasto. The many ways he applies paint create highly visual works that depict natural forces and movement. In 1919, de Staël’s family fled the Russian Revolution and settled in Poland. He later studied in Brussels at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, where he was influenced by Cubism and Post-Impressionism.

An influential Dutch movement in art and architecture founded in 1917 by abstractionists Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Bart van der Leck. De Stijl originated as a publication in which Mondrian elaborated on Neo-Plasticism, a restrained visual language based on primary colours and simple geometric forms that embodied a spiritualism derived from theosophy. After the First World War, De Stijl embraced the utopian potential of art. De Stijl heavily influenced the International Modern style of architecture.

A painter, photographer, and entomologist inspired by nature and vibrant Brazilian landscapes. De Tonnancour’s landscape and figure paintings were influenced by the Group of Seven, Goodridge Roberts, and Pablo Picasso. As a member of the short-lived Prisme d’Yeux group (1948–1949), he opposed the Automatistes. In 1982, he stopped painting and began to study insects. De Tonnancour was named to the Order of Canada in 1979 and to the National Order of Quebec in 1993.

A Paris-born painter who, alongside André Derain and Henri Matisse, pioneered the style of Fauvist painting in the very early 1900s, which used intense, unnatural colours to craft highly expressive landscape and urban scenes. De Vlaminck notably criticized the prominence of other modernist art movements prevalent in Europe at the time, especially the Cubism of Pablo Picasso.

A Leeds, U.K.–born multidisciplinary artist whose work has encompassed performance art, complex photographic self-portraiture, and installations involving robotics and electronics. A well-known example of the latter is As Yet Untitled, 1992–1995, which revolves around a robotic arm that shreds photographs and remains in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent collection.

A Toronto-based artist whose practice is broadly concerned with the interplay between the everyday and the mythological. After completing his studies in Montreal in the late 1960s, Dean became a founding member of the avant-garde artist-run gallery Véhicule Art in 1972. He settled in Toronto in 1976, and became widely known for his monumental sculpture The Floating Staircase, 1978–81, which floated in Toronto harbour for two years. Dean represented Canada at the 1999 Venice Biennale.

A painter associated with the second generation of Woodland School artists, Debassige used a graphic style to explore the intersection of Anishinaabe cosmology and teachings with contemporary social and environmental concerns.

An artistic and literary movement in Europe during the final years of the eighteenth century. Characterized by novels such as Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), decadence features literary devices such as neurosis, despair, and mystery taken up in the tradition of Symbolism and the rejection of Naturalism.

Developed in the eighteenth century, decalcomania is a transfer technique in which ink or some other pigment is pressed between two surfaces—often glass, porcelain, paper, or some combination. When paper is used, it may be folded to create a mirror image. The resulting blot may then be embellished or otherwise added to. Decalcomania was adopted by the Surrealists and Automatistes as a way to introduce chance into the making of an image.

A photographic concept developed by French artist Henri Cartier-Bresson describing the precise instant when compositional elements, human movement, and visual dynamics converge. Photographers identify and capture a split-second moment when spatial relationships and time meet to create a comprehensive visual statement.

Decorative art encompasses the design and decoration of objects that are both aesthetic and functional. Craft and applied arts are often considered synonyms. The scope of decorative art objects is wide, including items such as basketry, ceramics, furniture, glassware, jewellery, and textiles.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists who would come to be associated with Vancouver photo-conceptualism, including Jeff Wall, created works that they categorized as “defeatured” landscapes. These were images of the urban environment that focused on generic industrial areas and city streets. By contrast to romantic approaches to depicting the Canadian wilderness, through these photographs artists hoped to call attention to the conditions of alienation in capitalist society.

DeForest was a Canadian landscape painter best known for his detailed oil paintings of the mountain scenery of Alberta and British Columbia. DeForest was born in New Brunswick and received training at the South Kensington School of Art in London and the Académie Julian in Paris. He travelled and painted extensively in Europe and Australasia. DeForest was a leader of the early arts scene in Vancouver where he served as the first curator of the Museum of Vancouver and on the executive committees of the Arts, Historical & Scientific Association, British Columbia Society of Fine Arts, Arts & Crafts Association, Vancouver Studio Club, Vancouver Photographic Society and the Royal Agricultural and Industrial Society Exhibition at New Westminster.

A painter, sculptor, printmaker, and draftsman, Degas was aligned with but separate from the Impressionist movement, frequently departing from its norms: he was not interested in changing atmospheric effects and rarely painted outdoors. Characteristic subjects include the ballet, theatre, cafés, and women at their toilette.

A leading French Romantic painter whose use of rich, sensual colours influenced the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Following the Romantic tradition, Delacroix portrayed exoticized Moroccan subjects and dramatic scenes from history and contemporary events. His frenzied brushwork conveyed tragedy and emotion. Among his most well-known paintings is Liberty Leading the People, 1830.

Born François-Guillaume Lahaise, Guy Delahaye was inspired by the poetry of Émile Nelligan, whom he discovered during a period of convalescence as an adolescent. His work is associated with the birth of modern Québécois literature, with poems that rejected pastoral subjects of the past. He was the subject of intense criticism after the publication of his first collection, which was condemned as a decadent and pretentious work. Although Delahaye withdrew from public literary activities, he continued to write poetry.

Working in plaster and bronze, Delahaye created roughly modelled figurative sculptures. He was active in the 1950s and early 1960s, exhibiting primarily in France and Germany, including at documenta II in Kassel. At some point after 1960 he shifted his focus from artmaking to teaching, and from 1975 to 1993 he was a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. With Rosaline Granet and Turriddu Clementi, Delahaye established the art foundry Fonderie Berjac in Meudon, France, in 1959.

The first truly abstract painter in France. Delaunay’s interest in colour theory—including how colours interact and relate to music and movement—is manifest in almost all of his work. Dubbed Orphism by Guillaume Apollinaire, his style influenced numerous artists and artistic movements, including German Expressionism, Futurism, and Synchromism.

A painter and textile designer, Sonia Delaunay was married to Robert Delaunay, with whom she developed Orphism. A leader in the fashion industry during the 1920s, she returned to painting after the collapse of her design business during the Depression. In the 1930s she was associated with the Abstraction-Création group.

Beginning with her tenure at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1971 to 1978, Suzanne Delehanty has been an influential museum director and curator, with positions across the United States. Her work focuses on American contemporary art, with major exhibitions and publications on artists including Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, and Paul Thek. 
 

A philosopher of difference, Gilles Deleuze understood that philosophy was a creative activity, and he often focused on questions raised by art and literature. With Félix Guattari, he offered a critique of psychoanalysis that proposes a positive view of desire and a theory of unconscious political collectivity that is neither individual nor familial. Equally a historian, Deleuze chose to highlight neglected philosophies by the rationalist tradition and authors such as Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza.

A sculptor and conceptual artist concerned with issues raised by twentieth-century modernism, including (self-)referentiality, content and form, and material. His work is exhibited regularly throughout Canada. He is a professor at NSCAD University in Halifax.

A Winnipeg-based interdisciplinary artist and activist known for her collaboration with Lorri Millan. Their performances, videos, and installations address themes of gender, sexuality, and queer culture. Their works, such as Lesbian National Parks and Services, 1997–2015, challenge societal norms and explore the complexities of identity, using humour and satire to provoke critical thought and social change.

A watercolourist and oil painter, Demuth was a key contributor to Precisionism, a movement that imported Cubist influences (like sharp geometric planes and bold colours) to an American landscape. Demuth privately depicted the gay subcultures of Paris and New York.

A painter, printmaker, designer, and influential theorist whose ideas contributed to the development of the anti-naturalist aesthetic of modernism. Denis was a founding member of the Nabis, an avant-garde artists’ group active in Paris from 1888 to 1900, and is also well known for his later, overtly religious works.

A painter, sculptor, printmaker, and designer of theatre sets, Derain co-founded the Fauvist movement, active from about 1905 to 1908. He is known for the expressive characteristics typical of Fauvism, including the use of vibrant and unrealistic colours (sometimes straight from the paint tube), simplified forms, and raw canvas that showed in the final product. Derain’s interest in African tribal masks likely influenced Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. His later works turn to a more conservative, Neoclassical style.

A panel painting, c. 1440, by the great Netherlandish artist Rogier van der Weyden, held by the Museo del Prado, Madrid. Considered an example of van der Weyden’s remarkable refinement and spirituality, it is one of the most influential depictions of the Descent of the Early Netherlandish school of painting.

It is now known that “Monsù Desiderio” was in fact two artists, François de Nomé (French, c. 1593–after 1644) and Didier Barra (French, c. 1590–1650). Natives of Metz living in Naples, they occasionally worked together. Barra primarily painted views of Naples, while de Nomé is known for his paintings of architecture, ruins, and fantastical buildings.

A painter heavily influenced early in his career by the Symbolist Gustave Moreau. Desvallières’s later work portrayed daily life. Still later he concentrated on painting religious subjects; in 1919 he founded the Ateliers d’art sacré with Maurice Denis.

A mixed-media installation artist, writer, and curator of Anishinaabe/Ojibwe descent, acclaimed for her critical explorations of Ojibwe traditions and colonial legacies. Bonnie Devine has used video, sculpture, painting, and storytelling to interrogate complicated issues of land, treaties, and Indigenous-settler contact. She is an Associate Professora Emerita and founding chair of the Indigenous Visual Culture program at OCAD University in Toronto.

An artist, teacher, and writer based in London, Ontario, active in the development of the local arts scene at mid-century. One the first Canadians to produce abstract paintings, he was also a scholar of Indigenous art and the co-developer of the country’s first psychiatric art therapy program.

An academic, philosopher, and educator, Dewey is associated with the philosophical movement known as pragmatism—specifically experimentalism or instrumentalism—as well as with functional psychology and his concern over social issues. Believing that education was at the root of social and political reform, Dewey lectured on the importance of educational reform, advocating for experiential learning during the 1920s. Among other prominent intellectuals, Dewey founded the New School for Social Research in 1919.

A renowned art critic and impresario, and founder of the Ballets Russes. This innovative company, founded in Paris in 1909, was a watershed in the development of modern performance, bringing artists from all disciplines—many now iconic figures in twentieth-century art—to collaborate in its productions.

An artist, scholar, and educator known for her work in media arts, digital art, video, and interactive installations. Her artistic practice explores the intersection of culture, digital media, and storytelling to reflect on the impact of technology on society. A former president of OCAD University, she was the only openly lesbian university and college president in Canada until 2019.

A landscape painter who, beginning in the early 1830s, established friendships with artists with whom he later formed the Barbizon school. Like most of those artists, he worked extensively in the forest of Fontainebleau, where he often spent his summers. He had a particularly close relationship with fellow Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau. Diaz de la Peña’s landscapes tend to be more richly painted and to rely on more dramatic lighting effects than do the generally more meditative views of his colleagues.

A Dutch artist known for his Conceptual photography practice that often focuses on geometric forms as well as landscapes and oceans. He trained as an art teacher at the Tilburg Academy and studied painting before gravitating to colour photography. His work can be found in public collections at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Tate Gallery.

Born in Alert Bay, B.C., as a young man Dick completed an apprenticeship with the artist Tony Hunt Sr. and worked with Bill Reid. Dick is known as an artist specializing in masks, and he is widely respected as a dancer who has performed at numerous ceremonies. 

This American Precisionist painter specialized in industrial subjects and cityscapes rendered with layered geometric shapes. Dickinson studied under William Merritt Chase in New York. His influences included the Parisian Cubists, Paul Cézanne, Futurism, and Japanese prints.

Born in Chicago and educated at prestigious schools in the United States and France, Dickinson travelled to Mexico in 1934 and subsequently spent most of his life there. He became director of the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende and helped to establish the town as a hub of expatriate American artistic life.

A German Expressionist group of artists and architects who were critical of the dominant social order and middle-class sensibilities. Formed in Dresden in 1905 and existing until 1913, the original group consisted of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Fritz Bleyl. Die Brücke embraced a communal atmosphere and a bold artistic style with simple forms and clashing colours.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Richard Diebenkorn was a California-based artist. Early in his career, he produced abstract work influenced by Henri Matisse, experimenting with a sense of aerial perspective on the landscape developed while he was completing a master’s in fine art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Diebenkorn established his reputation with the series of figurative works he produced from 1956 to 1966, before returning to abstraction. In all of Diebenkorn’s work the process of painting remains visible in the final canvas.

Refers to artwork created or manipulated with digital technology, often through the use of computer programs, artificial intelligence, and electronic software. It gained traction in the late 1990s as public access to digital technology and media became more widespread.

A conceptual artist, Dion is best known for combining science and art in his installations. He often uses cabinets of curiosity and taxonomic methods to examine how public institutions and dominant ideologies shape human understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Dion has produced several large commissions and received many accolades, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucelia Art Award in 2008.

An Expressionist painter and printmaker who created harshly satirical, sometimes grotesque depictions of figures from Weimar Germany, Dix was a pioneer of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. War, prostitution, and human depravity were central themes of his work.

A respected contemporary artist based in Regina whose work combines moving images, sculpture, and installation. Exploring patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, Ayla Dmyterko’s art is shaped by her experience as part of the Ukrainian diaspora. She studied at the University of Regina and the Glasgow School of Art, and now shows internationally.

Born in Barrington, Nova Scotia, Thomas Coffin Doane (often credited as T.C. Doane and not to be confused with Nova Scotia politician Thomas Coffin) learned the daguerreotype photography process in Halifax from artist William Valentine and was a successful photographer in Montreal from the 1840s to the 1860s. He was known for his portraits of prominent Canadians, including Lord Elgin and Louis-Joseph Papineau.

One of the world’s longest-running international art events and most important recurrent exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. It launched in 1955 in Kassel, Germany, with the primary intention of reintegrating Germany into the international art scene after the Second World War. It takes place in Kassel every five years.

An Edinburgh-born artist who lived in Canada during his childhood and youth and later settled in Trinidad. Doig’s paintings command high prices today. Influenced by modernism and popular culture, he uses heightened colour and technique to evoke strange landscapes, often with a human presence and an unsettling, otherworldly mood. He travels widely, always paints in a studio, and often produces works in a series.

Domínguez, a painter, moved to Paris when he was twenty-one, becoming involved in the Surrealist movement led by André Breton. In the 1930s he began using the technique of decalcomania to create works, and he introduced fellow Surrealist Max Ernst to this method of artmaking. Domínguez’s style shows the influence of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist works, and bulls appear frequently in his paintings.

One of the foremost commercial galleries in Canada, the Dominion Gallery in Montreal was founded in 1941 by Rose Millman. The gallery was purchased in 1947 by Max Stern, who became its major proponent and director for the next forty years. The gallery promoted contemporary Canadian artists, both established and emerging, and was the first in Canada to offer represented artists a guaranteed annual income. The gallery closed in December 2000, reopening in 2005.

Dona trained in Jerusalem before moving to New York, where she studied under Keith Haring at the School of Visual Arts. Her brightly coloured paintings straddle the line between abstraction and figuration, rigid geometry and gesture. Graffiti-like forms figure prominently in her canvases.

An Ontario-born graphic designer, he trained at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. Mentor and teacher Allan Fleming was a great influence, and he eventually worked with Fleming at the graphic design firm Cooper & Beatty in Toronto. Donoahue went on to positions at leading creative agencies in Toronto, and his most famous design was for the Canada wordmark, adopted by the Government of Canada in 1980.

A multimedia artist working in electronics, film, painting, and printmaking, Montreal-born Capal Doray arrived in Vancouver in the late 1950s. Through her involvement in the multidisciplinary art space New Design Gallery and her position as an instructor at the Vancouver School of Art, she became part of the transformation of the city’s art scene in the postwar period. She is married to fellow artist Victor Doray.

Doré worked in various media, including painting and sculpture, but was best known as a popular caricaturist, illustrator, and printmaker. He produced large numbers of wood engravings for many publications, including literary works by authors such as Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Cervantes, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Technically brilliant, his illustrations and prints were often characterized by their exploitation of fantasy, excess, and the sublime.

A public art gallery located at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, which opened in 2004 and is named after the artist Doris McCarthy. The gallery’s permanent collection houses over 2,000 contemporary works of art and two fonds of archival material from McCarthy.

A Canadian landscape and portrait painter known for his thick, almost sculptural, impasto surfaces. In the 2013–14 exhibition You Are Here: Kim Dorland and the Return to Painting at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, in Kleinburg, Ontario, fifty of his paintings hung alongside works by Tom Thomson, David Milne, and Emily Carr.

The wholesale marketing division of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (now Kinngait Studios), based in Toronto and established in 1978, Dorset Fine Arts makes available to an international market Inuit sculptures, drawings, and prints.

Since the 1980s, Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas has been recognized internationally for his diverse image-based practice, which explores moments of social transformation through the creation of speculative histories. Douglas was the artist selected to represent Canada in the 2022 Venice Biennale.

An important American modernist and one of the first artists in the United States to create entirely non-representational works. Among Dove’s clear influences are the French avant-garde painters Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne as well as Cubism and Futurism. His first solo exhibition was held at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York.

An American painter, photographer, and printmaker deeply inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, often making use of minimalist compositions; flattened, soft colours; and unconventional cropping techniques in his work. He was largely based in New York City, where he taught at the Pratt Institute, the New York Art Students League, and Columbia University’s Teachers College. In 1891 he founded the Ipswich Summer School of Art in his hometown of Ipswich, Massachusetts.

A gallery opened in about 1878 by art dealer Charles William Dowdeswell in London, England. The Dowdeswell Gallery supported rising English artists from 1878 to the early 1920s, exhibiting their paintings and publishing their prints. Among the artists promoted by the gallery were James McNeill Whistler, Myles Birket Foster, and Byam Shaw.

A painter, collector, patron, and—following her exposure to the European avant-garde with the 1913 Armory Show—a fierce promoter of modern art in the United States. To champion this cause, Dreier co-founded the Société Anonyme with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in 1920.

A poet and painter whose early figurative paintings were influenced by Jean Paul Lemieux, with whom she studied at the l’École des Beaux-Arts de Québec (now part of Université Laval) in 1951. In the 1970s Drouin turned to abstraction. The discovery of surrealist poetry informed both her writing and her art, which is more sensual than the work of the Plasticiens who were active in Montreal at the time. In 1992 she was named to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Developed in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox, and improved upon by Richard Kennett and Charles Bennett in 1873 and 1878, the dry plate process revolutionized photography with its convenience by comparison to the wet collodion process that preceded it. Rather than needing to be exposed, sensitized, and developed while still wet, the dry plate process allowed a silver bromide gelatin emulsion to dry on glass plates that could then be transported and exposed at a later time.

An intaglio printmaking technique in which an image is scratched onto a (usually copper) plate with a needle-like instrument. This method produces a softened line due to raised edges in the metal around the scratched image and is best for creating small editions of works. Drypoint is often used in combination with etching.

A priest and historian who entered into the Jesuit order in 1614. He is the author of the Historiae Canadensis (1664), an illustrated history of Canada that Du Creux compiled from conversations with missionaries who had been in New France, including Jean de Brébeuf and Father Paul Le Jeune.

A rebellious avant-garde artist whose career spanned some fifty years and encompassed painting, sculpting, and printmaking. Dubuffet railed against intellectual authority in culture, countering it with art brut (literally, “raw art”). His oeuvre evidences frequent shifts in style and impassioned experimentation.

A sculptor and the brother of artist Marcel Duchamp, he was an early and instrumental promoter of the Cubists as a jury member of the Salon d’Automne. Duchamp-Villon began creating Cubist sculptures in 1910, gradually moving toward the more energetic and mechanistic style visible in his last work, Le cheval (Horse), 1914.

One of the most significant artist-thinkers of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp influenced Conceptual, Pop, and Minimal art. Best known for the sensational painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912, he is also recognized for his readymade sculptures, among them Fountain, 1917 (a urinal), and his “desecrated” Mona Lisa print, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919.

An anthropologist trained at the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington, Duff was curator of anthropology at the British Columbia Provincial Museum (now the Royal BC Museum) and its archives in Victoria from 1950 to 1965. While in this position, he became involved in totem pole preservation projects.

Rodolphe Duguay was a landscape painter who also practised wood engraving. He studied in France for seven years before returning to Quebec in 1927. He existed on the margins of the artistic milieu of his time. A rural and Catholic painter, he did not take part in the debates surrounding the new modernist aesthetic in Montreal, nor did he take orders from the church.

An art critic, historian, and collector who wrote on such notable Quebec artists as Alfred Pellan, Benoît East, Jean Paul Lemieux, Claude Picher, Paul André, and Jean Dallaire. Dumas was also a medical doctor, with an interest in the role of art in the history of medicine.

A painter, printmaker, and educator. Over the course of his career, Dumouchel worked variously in Surrealist, abstract, and figurative modes, producing a body of work that reflects the trajectory of modern art in Quebec. In 1948, he signed the Prisme d’yeux manifesto spearheaded by the painter Alfred Pellan.

A painter, graphic artist, and filmmaker, Duncan worked across figurative and abstract styles in a prolific career that spanned the twentieth century. While part of the graphics department of the National Film Board of Canada in the 1940s, she met her partner Audrey McLaren, with whom she would form the experimental film company Dunclaren Productions. During the Second World War she documented industrial production related to the war effort in Montreal.

An early advocate of Canadian art, Duncan was a bookbinder, art dealer, and collector. He was a founder and became director of Toronto’s Picture Loan Society, which was the first gallery in Canada to facilitate the purchase of art by making works available for lease.

James Duncan was a painter, lithographer, and drawing teacher who was born in Coleraine and immigrated to Lower Canada in 1825. He achieved renown for his many oil, gouache, and watercolour views of Montreal and established himself as the major chronicler of the city in the mid-nineteenth century.

An abstract painter active since the 1970s in New York, whose early works evoke modernist predecessors such as Arshile Gorky and André Masson. Dunham’s more recent paintings often display cartoon-like forms, lurid colours, and an interest in organic matter.

A landscape and marine painter and a leading member of the Barbizon school, although he seldom took the forest of Fontainebleau as a subject. As a young artist, Dupré had been influenced by the work of the English Romantic landscape painter John Constable. Throughout his career he was less interested than most of his Barbizon colleagues in exploring the shifting effects of light than he was in transmuting the landscape into emotionally evocative visual statements.

A German printmaker, painter, and theorist active during the Renaissance. Dürer is best known for his intricate woodblock prints, which transformed the medium into a respected art form like sculpture and painting. One of the most prominent figures of the Northern Renaissance, Dürer travelled to Italy and played a significant role in the exchange of artistic knowledge between northern and southern Europe. He is recognized for his religious prints and paintings, accomplished portraits and self-portraits, and treatises on perspective and human proportions.

A sculptor, poet, and activist involved in the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, Durham is known for combining natural materials and found objects to challenge Western representations of North American Indigenous peoples. While Durham identifies as Cherokee, in 2017 his claims as such were rejected by prominent Cherokee groups, artists, and curators.

The Dutch Gallery was opened in 1892 as the London, England, branch of the Amsterdam-based E.J. van Wisselingh & Co. art dealership. Operating until the First World War, the gallery exhibited especially Barbizon and Hague School landscapes and genre scenes. The Dutch Gallery was renamed E.J. van Wisselingh’s Gallery in 1906.

This period of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic saw rapid economic growth based on trade, shipbuilding, advancements in energy technology, colonization, and the predominance of Protestantism. The arts and several other fields flourished as the population boomed, wages grew, and patronage increased. The nation became one of the world’s wealthiest, with Amsterdam positioned as the arts capital. Notable figures of this era include philosopher Baruch Spinoza and painters Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt van Rijn.

A photographic process whereby colours are printed separately and then layered and combined to create a final saturated image. An early version of the process was first used by Technicolor in the late 1920s; the dye transfer materials were manufactured by the Eastman Kodak Company, who improved and commercialized the process in 1946. In the postwar years it was used widely in commercial photography and advertising.

A design theory developed by Jay Hambidge, which had a profound influence on both abstract and representational painters during the 1920s and 1930s. Dynamic symmetry is a proportioning system, whereby mathematical formulas are the foundation of the proportion and symmetry of classical architecture and various natural structures.

Born in Crest, France, Edmond Dyonnet immigrated to Canada with his family in 1875. After studying in Turin and Naples, he established a career as an artist in Montreal. He became a professor at the Conseil des arts et manufactures in Montreal, and he was secretary to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts from 1910 to 1949.

An Irish-born artist who initially settled in St. John’s, Newfoundland, before moving to Halifax in 1834, where he worked as an art teacher and offered classes in painting and drawing. He is best known for his lithographs that capture the landscapes of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, now considered important documents that provide a glimpse into the provinces’ early history.

A painter, sculptor, and photographer best known for his psychological and often unflattering portrait paintings. Success came posthumously to Thomas Eakins; little admired during his life, in the 1930s he came to be celebrated as one of his era’s greatest American artists.

A painter and printmaker influenced by luminaries of the French avant-garde, including Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. He is best known for creating, with Marius Plamondon, a sixty-foot stained glass window for Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel. East taught lithography and engraving at the École des beaux-arts de Québec (now part of Université Laval).

The husband of the Canadian artist Mary Bell Eastlake, Charles Herbert Eastlake was a British painter. After training in Europe, he established himself in London and spent time with the plein air painters of St. Ives in Cornwall, where he met his wife.

A painter, jewellery maker, and watercolourist, Eastlake was born in Ontario and later studied with William Merritt Chase in New York and at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. From about 1893 to 1939, Eastlake lived in England, where she designed and produced jewellery with her husband. She exhibited widely with many art associations in Canada and held a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) in 1927.

An artist, topographer, and military officer who trained at West Point Military Academy. While stationed in Minnesota, Eastman began depicting First Nations peoples, and in 1847 he was commissioned to illustrate the monumental study Indian Tribes of the United States for the U.S. Congress.

An English-born photographer and photojournalist, Rosemary Gilliat Eaton is best known for her documentary images from the 1950s and 1960s. Primarily a freelancer, Gilliat’s work was featured in major publications such as Canadian Geographic and Maclean’s, and she completed a number of assignments for government agencies, including the Department of Northern Affairs and the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division.

A landscape, genre, and portrait painter as well as an illustrator, Eaton was born in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, but moved to New York City in 1867 before spending four years, 1872–1876, working and studying in London and Paris. Following his first trip to France he was inspired by the work of Jean-François Millet and other artists of the Barbizon school. Eaton taught at The Cooper Union art school in New York, and was a founding member of the Society of Canadian Artists, as well as of both the American Art Association and its successor, the Society of American Artists.

Founded by American Paul Twitchell in 1965, this religious movement was influenced by surat shabd yoga. Followers of Eckankar adopt various practices that facilitate soul transcendence by allowing a connection with the Divine Light and Sound. Eckankar translates as “coworker with God.”

A Calgary-born artist and arts educator, Christian Eckart’s often monochromatic works use a Conceptual or meta-painting approach to examine the context that surrounds a work of art and what is included and excluded within a picture’s frame. In 2009, he was appointed to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

A major institution in nineteenth-century France, the École des beaux-arts has its origins in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture established by Louis XIV in 1648. This academy was suppressed during the French Revolution, and the École was established in 1819, becoming the new national art school. It was based on an atelier system in which students worked in studios with different master artists, learning to draw in the academic tradition and participating in regular competitions.

The École des beaux-arts de Montréal was founded in 1922, the same year as its sister institution, the École des beaux-arts de Québec. The curriculum emphasized industrial arts, trades, and commercial design, but the school gradually came into its own as an important training ground for painters, sculptors, and other serious artists, culminating in what has been called its “golden age” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1969 it was absorbed into the fine arts department of the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Founded in 1922, the École des beaux-arts de Québec became an important centre for the study of applied arts and fine arts, including architecture, drawing, engraving, tapestry, decorative arts (design), and art history. Among its famous students were Maximilien Boucher, Raoul Hunter, and Alfred Pellan. In 1970, the school became part of Université Laval.

In 1930 the artist Jean-Marie Gauvreau established the École du meuble, which trained its students in technical arts and drawing, painting, design, art history, sculpture, and even law. Many of Quebec’s future avant-garde artists, including Paul-Émile Borduas, Marcel Barbeau, Maurice Perron, and other signatories of the Refus global (1948), taught or received their training here.

A leading landscape painter of his day, Edson spent time living and studying in England, Scotland, and France at various points in his life, but otherwise centred his career in Montreal and in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. His early interest in vivid detail was augmented by his rich and sophisticated sense of colour, and by his poetic experiments with the depiction of light. Edson was a founding member of the Society of Canadian Artists (1867). His death at the age of forty-one cut short one of the most accomplished artistic careers of his day in Canada.

Characterized by the lack of a distinct self or ego, egolessness is a central tenant of Buddhism, where it describes a “middle way” between a belief in an eternal self or soul that continues after the death of the body and a belief in a temporary self that is contained within and dependent on a physical or material body for its existence. Instead, the ego is posited as a process rather than a stable entity or sense of self, which must be lost or forgotten on the way to enlightenment.

Regarded as a great master of folk art, Collins Eisenhauer is best known for his carvings of birds, animals, and people. He was born in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, and embarked on his artistic practice after retiring in 1964, although it was not until the early 1970s that Eisenhauer’s work began to receive public attention. His works are found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Canadian Museum of History.

Born in Riga, Latvia (at the time part of the Russian Empire), Sergei Eisenstein was an influential Soviet filmmaker. He developed the idea of montage—inserting images independent of the film’s main action to generate psychological impact—and wrote theoretical works describing the essential place of the technique in his understanding of film. Working in the U.S.S.R. and Mexico, Eisenstein made films using recent history (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) and medieval epic (Alexander Nevsky, 1938) to depict social issues, espousing a Bolshevik ideal of collectivism and formalist principles that often put him at odds with the Stalinist government.

Painter, sculptor, and architect considered the first master of the Spanish School. Born Doménikos Theotokópoulos in Crete, El Greco settled in Toledo, Spain, in 1576, where he executed major commissions throughout his career, including the prized altarpieces Espolio, 1577–79, and Burial of Count Orgaz, 1586–88.

An experimental filmmaker, critic, philosopher, and teacher, Elder rose to prominence in the 1980s with his film cycle The Book of All the Dead (1975–94) among the most ambitious projects in the history of avant-garde cinema. His book Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (1989) is highly regarded and features in Canadian Studies programs.

A photographer active in Saint-Jean and Quebec City, George William Ellisson (also spelled Ellison) captured portraits of prominent figures like Sir John A. Macdonald and documented local landscapes and architecture. His popular stereographs provided viewers with immersive experiences of Quebec City.

Larry Emerson was an artist, scholar, Indigenous activist, and educator. His academic pursuits focused on methodologies of decolonization and Diné traditions and philosophies. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Emerson participated in several significant North American exhibitions on contemporary Indigenous art, alongside artists such as Carl Beam, Robert Houle, and Gerald McMaster.

Originally founded in 1925 by the British Columbia Art League as the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, the school changed its name to the Vancouver School of Art in 1936. In 1980 it became the Emily Carr College of Art and, in 2008, obtained university status as the Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

An annual two-week summer program established by Canadian artists Arthur McKay (1926–2000) and Kenneth Lochhead (1926–2006) in 1955. The goal of the workshops was to connect Saskatchewan artists with the greater art world by inviting art theorists, critics, and artists to conduct workshops at the remote location of Emma Lake in northern Saskatchewan. Throughout the years, the workshop leaders included influential figures such as Clement Greenberg, Barnett Newman, and Will Barnet.

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 form of painting using hot beeswax mixed with pigment, encaustic painting first emerged in Ancient Greece, with the earliest surviving examples being the Fayum mummy portraits produced in Egypt between the first and third centuries CE. The medium experienced a resurgence in the twentieth century, with artists including Jasper Johns and Tony Sherman producing work in encaustic.

The name applied to both a type of print and the process used in its production. Engravings are made by cutting into a metal, wood, or plastic plate with specialized tools and then inking the incised lines. The ink is transferred to paper under the immense pressure of a printing press.

An Inuit sculptor from northern Quebec, Ennutsiak gained early recognition for his scenes of everyday life; he tackled unusual subjects such as birthing scenes and groups of people reading the Bible.

Founded in 1972 by Elizabeth Nichol, Equinox Gallery, located in East Vancouver, presents contemporary art and photography. Featuring ten exhibitions a year, the gallery represents a mix of senior and emerging artists and artists’ estates. Equinox Gallery is committed to promoting the work of Canadian artists to help them earn international recognition.

The first Canadian architect to win an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (1986), Erickson completed numerous projects in Canada and internationally. His Vancouver office introduced modernist residential projects that brought new aesthetics to the city’s architecture in the 1950s. He went on to design contributions to Expo 67 and Expo 70 as well as permanent structures such as Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall and the original campus for Simon Fraser University.

A prolific artist and pioneering member of both Dada and Surrealism. Ernst worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, collage, and printmaking, and invented the experimental artistic techniques of frottage, grattage, and decalcomania. Critical of what he saw as the irrationality of the modern world, Ernst was largely inspired in his work by the Surrealist interest in dreams and the unconscious.

A Photorealist painter whose pictures are often constructed from more than one photographic source image, thereby presenting a “reality” that never existed or could never be perceived by the naked eye. His preferred subject is the built environment, typically of New York City.

A printmaking technique that follows the same principles as engraving but uses acid instead of a burin to cut through the plate. A copper plate is coated with a waxy acid resist; the artist draws an image into the wax with a needle. The plate is then immersed in an acid bath, incising the lines and leaving the rest of the plate untouched.

A term historically used to refer to art by non-Western artists, ethnic art was traditionally collected by ethnographic and natural history museums rather than art galleries. The term has been criticized for separating non-Western artists, including Indigenous artists, from their Western peers, and excluding them from art markets and discussions of art’s place in society both historically and in the present day.

A painter, illustrator, draftsman, and filmmaker, Etrog was known principally as a sculptor, creating variously sized abstract works reflecting the human form. One of his many commissions was the bronze statuette known from 1968 to 1980 as the Etrog, the award for excellence presented to Canadian filmmakers, subsequently called the Genie. His work is in important public and private collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe. (See Sorel Etrog: Life & Work by Alma Mikulinsky.)

An American artist who from 1895 to 1898 served as the first principal—and first woman leader—of the Victoria School of Art and Design (now NSCAD University). She graduated from the School of Industrial Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, studied at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, and was best known for her watercolours and still-life paintings.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans became widely acclaimed for his photographs documenting workers and architecture in the southeastern U.S. during the Great Depression. He collaborated with writer James Agee on the classic book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). He was a staff photographer at Fortune magazine for twenty years and then a professor at Yale University.

Based in Montreal, Evergon (born Albert Jay Lunt) is an artist, educator, and activist with alter-egos including Cellulose Evergoni, Eve R. Gonzales, and Egon Brut. His wide-ranging contributions to photography have taken the form of photo-collage, colour photocopying, and experiments with the cyanotype, Polaroid, and hologram processes. He is celebrated for his elaborately staged tableaux, striking self-portraits, and sustained exploration of queer sexuality, masculinity, and social constructions of gender.

American-born painter who settled in Winnipeg in 1907. Ewart trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and with John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. She was a strong advocate for the establishment of the Winnipeg Art Gallery and Winnipeg School of Art, arguing for social as well as aesthetic reasons. Ewart also served as president of the Western Art Association.

Born in Montreal and later settling in London, Ontario, Ewen was involved with the Automatistes, the Plasticiens, and the London Regionalists, although he was never fully identified with a single movement. His mature works embraced experimentation with colour combinations and textures, and the use of gouged plywood as a painting surface. These invoked landscape and natural elements through abstract and geometric gestures. (See Paterson Ewen: Life & Work by John Hatch.)

An ex-libris (or bookplate) is a personal engraving pasted into the front of a book that indicates ownership. The term originates form the Latin phrase ex libris meis, which signifies that the book is a part of someone’s collection.

Directed at a god or saint, an ex-voto is an offering: for something desired, or in gratitude for something that has been received. These offerings may be in the form of pictures, printed Bible verses, figurines, crucifixes, other religious objects, or small personal items such as clothing, jewellery, or toys.

Titled in full the Exhibition of Contemporary Canadian Painting: Arranged on Behalf of the Carnegie Corporation of New York for Circulation in the Southern Dominions of the British Empire, this show was first held at the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1936. It subsequently toured major cities in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii from September 1936 to April 1939.

An exhibition held at the Royal Institute Galleries, London, that formed part of the celebrations for the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth on May 12, 1937. The Canadian section subsequently toured to several English regional galleries until April 1938.

Exoticism is most often used to describe a quality of unusualness or unfamiliarity. When the term “exoticism” is used to discuss works of art or attitudes toward them, it refers to a way of looking at something that focuses on its otherness. Often, this means valuing a different culture specifically for its difference, rather than attempting to understand the numerous complex ways in which culture shapes society.

The world’s fair of 1967, held in Montreal, was a celebration of Canada’s Centennial. With sixty-two participating nations and attendance of more than 50 million people, Expo solidified Montreal’s reputation as an international city and Canada’s as a place for innovation.

Fifty-five countries participated in this world’s fair, held in Vancouver in celebration of the city’s centennial. Attended by over 22 million people, Expo 86 is now recognized as having been instrumental to the growth and development of Vancouver and to raising the city’s status internationally.

The French term for a large international exhibition that showcases national achievements in areas such as industrialization, agriculture, exports, and art. Known as the World’s Fair in English, these public exhibitions were popularized in the nineteenth century and had great influence on tourism, art and design, and international relations.

An intense, emotional style of art that values the representation of the artist’s subjective inner feelings and ideas. German Expressionism started in the early twentieth century in Germany and Austria. In painting, Expressionism is associated with an intense, jarring use of colour and brush strokes that are not naturalistic.

A collaborative method of creating a work, invented by the Surrealists. A participant draws on a sheet of paper, folds it to conceal the illustration, and passes it to the next player to extend the drawing. André Breton wrote that the technique, adapted from an old parlour game of words, emerged among artist friends at 54 rue du Château, Paris. Early participants were Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, Man Ray, and Joan Miró.

The process of removing natural resources from the earth and selling them on the global market. Linked to colonial expansion, capitalism, and neoliberalism, extractivist practices often involve exploitation and contribute to environmental degradation.

An artist, writer, curator, and professor of painting at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Since 1981 Eyland has concentrated on creating small-format drawings and paintings, the size of index cards. A permanent installation of over one thousand of his small paintings opened at the Millennium Library in Winnipeg in 2005, and another at Halifax Central Library in 2015.

A lauded, prolific, and widely collected painter, sculptor, and draftsman. Eyre’s significance lies equally in his teaching; a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg for more than three decades, he has worked closely with generations of Canadian artists. He is known primarily for his majestic prairie landscapes.

One of Canada’s most renowned sculptors, Joe Fafard was born in the rural French community of Ste. Marthe, Saskatchewan. His work drew on life in the province, including farm animals and portraits of family and friends. He taught at the University of Saskatchewan’s Regina campus, where colleagues encouraged him to work in clay. Fafard later turned to bronze and steel, creating numerous public artworks.

A seminal figure in the Vancouver art scene since the 1960s, Falk produces surreal and dreamlike works that reinvent everyday items as objects of wonder. Throughout her multidisciplinary practice in sculptural ceramics, painting, installation, and performance, she returns to subjects such as fruit, shoes, clothing, sidewalks, water, and skies. While distinctly personal, her work has been aligned with Funk, Fluxus, Surrealism, and Pop Art, and is widely recognized in Canada and abroad. (See Gathie Falk: Life & Work by Michelle Jacques)

A painter and illustrator influenced by mid-century American regionalist artists. Trained at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal (now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal), Faucher later taught art for the city’s Catholic school board.

A Montreal painter who participated in the first Automatiste exhibitions in the 1940s, Fauteux became associated with the avant-garde group through the artist Paul-Émile Borduas, whom he met at Montreal’s École du meuble. However, unlike the majority of Automatiste painters, Fauteux never embraced abstraction, nor was he a signatory of the group’s manifesto, Refus global, in 1948.

Employing overtly figurative or abstract styles, Fautrier created etchings, paintings, book illustrations, and sculpture. He is associated with 1950s Art Informel, though the gestural style seen in several of his paintings of the 1920s prefigures this movement by several decades.

The style of the Fauves (French for “wild beasts”), a group of painters who took their name from a derogatory phrase used by the French journalist Louis Vauxcelles. As a historical movement, Fauvism began at the controversial Salon d’Automne in 1905, and ended less than five years later, in early 1910. Fauvism was characterized by bold, unmixed colours, obvious brush strokes, and a subjective approach to representation. Among the most important of the Fauves were Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck.

A major contemporary multidisciplinary artist whose sculpture, drawings, and installations have been exhaustively exhibited and collected for the past five decades. Favro moved from Huntsville to London, Ontario, as a teenager; in the 1960s he was part of a dynamic group of London-based artists that included Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe.

This American, New Deal agency organized and funded employment in the visual arts under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 and was part of the Works Progress Administration (renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939). Artists supported by the Federal Art Project created 200,000 murals, posters, illustrations, and fine artworks, many of lasting importance.

A non-profit, membership-based organization devoted to advancing Canadian art. It was founded in 1941 by artists including André Biéler and Lawren Harris. The Federation of Canadian Artists maintains a members’ gallery on Granville Island, Vancouver.

Founded and incorporated in 1961 by M.F. (Budd) Feheley and now run by his daughter, Pat, Feheley Fine Arts is a Toronto, Ontario, art gallery dedicated to Inuit art. Artists represented by the gallery include major twentieth-century and contemporary figures such as Kenojuak Ashevak, Shuvinai Ashoona, Annie Pootoogook, and Jutai Toonoo.

The director of the Toronto commercial art gallery Feheley Fine Arts, Feheley is an expert in Inuit art. Since taking over from her father, M.F. (Budd) Feheley, who established the gallery in 1961, Feheley has represented important contemporary artists including Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016) and Shuvinai Ashoona (b.1961). She has also written extensively on the subject of Inuit art and served as a consultant for public and corporate Inuit art collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

A prominent figure in German Expressionism, and a member of several artist groups, including Die Brücke, the Novembergruppe, Gruppe 1919, and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He worked in multiple mediums, including painting, watercolour, and woodcut, and worked as a cartoonist for a portion of his career before becoming an instructor at Bauhaus in 1919 and fleeing the Nazi regime to return to New York City in 1937. Feininger was also a trained musician and composer.

An Ottawa artist currently based in Toronto whose multidisciplinary practice explores themes of body, embodiment, identity, and auto-ethnography in a sustained critique of the Colonial paradigm. feldman-kiss holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2011 feldman-kiss participated in the Canadian Forces Artists Program, for which they were embedded with the United Nations Mission in Sudan to shadow Canadian peacekeepers and international UN military observers. feldman-kiss’s work has been exhibited internationally.

Encompassing a wide range of historical and contemporary philosophical and political perspectives, feminism can be broadly understood as the belief that men and women should be socially, politically, and economically equal. In the West, a small number of women writers first began to question women’s inferior social status, particularly in matters of marriage and education, in the Renaissance. By the nineteenth century, prominent feminists in Britain, the United States, and Canada were championing the idea of women’s suffrage. The twentieth century has seen an expansion of feminist thinking to consider how race, class, work, sexuality, and a broader understanding of gender impact how different women experience inequality and shape the social justice goals of feminist movements around the world.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Gerald Ferguson was a Conceptual artist and painter who taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) from 1968 to 2003. Using everyday materials, he produced large-scale and often monochromatic canvases that explore the notion of authorship and the construction of meaning in painting. Ferguson played a key role in establishing NSCAD as a centre for Conceptual art.

A prominent early twentieth-century painter, Fergusson studied in Paris and spent many years there in artistic circles that included Impressionists, Fauves, and Cubists. His work, like that of other artists now known as the Scottish Colourists, displays the bold hues and graphic forms typical of French Post-Impressionist painting.

A painter, sculptor, and stained-glass artist and a member of the Montreal-based Automatistes. Ferron studied at the École des beaux-arts in Montreal (now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal) before meeting Paul-Émile Borduas, whose approach to modern art became crucial to her artistic development. In 1953 she moved to France, where she lived for thirteen years.

Also known as textile arts, fibre arts encompass a wide range of artistic activities that utilize natural fibres (such as cotton, wool, linen, or silk) or synthetic fibres (such as polyester or nylon) as their primary medium. Practices within the umbrella of fibre arts include weaving, knitting, embroidery, crocheting, and quilting.

A painter, clothing designer, and arts educator, Fife works in an expressionistic mode with subtle colours and brush strokes as metaphors for inner thought. She is the founder of the Fife Collection, a Native American clothing line with international recognition.

A descriptive term for an artwork that depicts or references recognizable objects or beings, including humans. Figurative art is often representational and takes source material from the real world, although its subjects may be overlaid with metaphors and allegory. The term arose in popular usage around the 1950s to describe artwork in contrast with the Abstract Expressionist movement as well as nonfigurative and non-objective art.

A compositional term referring to the perception of an object (the figure), as distinguished from its surround (the ground), especially in a context where this distinction is ambiguous. These two elements are interdependent—one defines the other. They can also be articulated as positive and negative shapes.

An abstract painter whose work is frequently gestural and calligraphic in style. Fink studied at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Art Students League of New York before moving to Paris in the 1950s, where he participated in several solo and group exhibitions.

A performance artist, activist, writer, and poet known for her work addressing social issues, gender politics, and sexuality. Her performances often include graphic depictions of sexuality, violence, and social taboos. Finley gained prominence as one of the NEA Four in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998), a landmark case on government arts funding and artistic expression.

A New York City-born artist best known for his Expressionistic, realist paintings of everyday suburban life in America. He received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) from 1974 to 1978 before serving as a trustee and senior critic at the New York Academy of Art. In 2006, he was honoured with a membership to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

An abstract artist and arts educator, Fisher became active in the vibrant art scene in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the 1960s and 1970s. During his career, he had both solo and group exhibitions, nationally and internationally. His most important Canadian commission was the mural he painted for the Montreal International Airport at Dorval. His work is held in collections across the country, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Musée des beaux arts du Québec.

An accomplished painter, Fisher received his formal training at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design) under the direction of Frederick Varley. As an official Canadian war artist during the Second World War, Fisher made 246 sketches that he later turned into watercolour and oil paintings. Prior to becoming a war artist, Fisher was known for a series of murals he painted for the British Columbia Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco.

A Winnipeg-born painter and printmaker, FitzGerald was a member of the Group of Seven from 1932 to 1933. He favoured depictions of prairie landscapes and houses, which he executed in pointillist, precisionist, and abstract styles. (See Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald: Life & Work by Michael-Parke Taylor.)

A Toronto-born, London, U.K.–based museum professional, academic, and artist whose work in each field has examined the history of institutional collections. Based in Montreal in the 1980s, she collaborated with French Canadian artist Lyne Lapointe on research-intensive site-specific public installations. In the 1990s, she moved to London, where her career shifted toward more interdisciplinary and academic projects.

An international collective of artists active in the 1960s and 1970s working in visual art, theatre, music, design, and poetry. Street art, festivals, and events (also called “Happenings”) figured prominently in Fluxus activities, which embraced process and experimentation over product, and strove to integrate art within everyday life. Influenced by John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, leading proponents of Fluxus include founder George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ken Friedman, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, and Joseph Beuys.

An artist and writer born in London, Ontario. Since 1976 he has lived in Toronto, where he is an active member of the artistic community as a board member, curator, arts writer, and teacher. Fones has explored issues of artistic production, materials, and representation in his photographs, sculptures, watercolours, and installations.

A mixed-media painter influenced by basketry designs, Maidu creation myths, and the trickster figure of the coyote. In 1979, Fonseca began his Coyote series, which depicted the traditional figure as a contemporary persona variously donning a leather jacket, clad in high-top sneakers, or situated in San Francisco’s Mission District or a Parisian café. Fonseca is known for connecting a past Native American identity to the present. In the 1990s his works became more abstract and political, referencing the physical and spiritual genocide of the Indigenous peoples of California.

An innovative abstract sculptor and painter born in Argentina. In Milan in 1947 Fontana founded Spazialismo, a movement that prefigured performance and Land art in its concern for time, space, and dynamism. In the late 1940s he began to slash and puncture his paintings, a novel technique intended to refute the canvas’s flatness. 

After studying in London, New York, Munich, Brittany, and the Netherlands, Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes arrived in Cornwall, in the United Kingdom, in 1885. There she met her husband, fellow painter Stanhope Forbes, with whom she would open the Newlyn School of Painting in 1899. Forbes exhibited and sold her paintings throughout her life, and was a prominent figure in the Cornwall artists’ colonies of the early twentieth century. Her work covers a range of styles and media, including early career etchings, with a particular focus on children.

Enlisting with the Canadian Army at the outbreak of the First World War, Forbes became an official Canadian war artist in 1918. Subsequently known as a portrait and landscape painter and opposed to modern art and, in particular, abstraction, Forbes resigned his memberships in the Ontario Society of Arts and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, in 1953 and 1958 respectively. He then became a founding member of the short-lived Ontario Institute of Painters, an association that focused on realism in painting.

Born in Dublin, Stanhope Forbes was raised in England. Influenced by the French plein air painters, he founded an art school in Newlyn, a Cornish village, with his wife, the Canadian painter Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes, in 1899. Forbes’s work includes genre scenes, landscapes, and interiors.

A reactionary association of painters, founded in Paris in the mid-1930s by art critic and painter Henri Hérault. The group rejected avant-garde movements such as Impressionism and Surrealism, seeking instead to revive principles of craftsmanship in French art by painting scenes of contemporary life in accessible, often realist styles.

A painter, muralist, writer, and jewellery maker, Harriet Ford studied at the Central Ontario School of Art in Toronto in 1881, then travelled to England and France to continue her art education at the Royal Academy of Arts and Académie Colarossi. She was a founding member of the Society of Mural Decorators. Ford co-edited the magazine Tarot (1896), which was dedicated to the Arts and Crafts movement.

The study of art by analyzing a work’s form and style to determine its meaning and quality. It emphasizes colour, texture, composition, and line over narrative, concept, or social and political context. In the 1960s, the American critic Clement Greenberg strongly championed formalism. By the end of the 1960s, postmodernism and conceptual art began to challenge formalism as a system of critique.

In art, the idea of l’informe was introduced by writer George Bataille in 1929 to describe an alternative to humanistic categories of art, one linked to his celebration of the debased. Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois reintroduced the term to critical discussions in 1996 to describe a thread that they saw running through the art of the twentieth century. In Buddhism, the world of formlessness is the world of the spirit, existing above the worlds of form and of desire.

A Nova Scotian artist known for his 1:1 scale sculptures in bronze, wood, and steel. In his Anything Less Is a Compromise, 2004, the famous Stanley Cup hockey trophy sits atop a washing machine, evoking the pedestal-artifact formation standard in sculpture; his Drum Kit, 2002, presents The Who drummer Keith Moon’s 1964 instrument scattered across the floor. These bronzes are in the collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.

A painter associated with Atlantic Realism whose carefully crafted, compelling pictures draw from a wide range of real and imagined sources. Mentored by Alex Colville at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, in the 1950s, Forrestall painted in egg tempera, a technique introduced to him by Colville and Forrestall’s classmate Christopher Pratt.

An artist, dancer, and choreographer who was an important figure in the development of experimental dance and Minimalism in the 1960s. Born in Italy, Forti moved to New York in the early 1960s, where she invented a style of dance based on improvisation and natural movements. In 1960, she introduced her Dance Constructions, in which dancers’ bodies together form a dance that may also be interpreted as sculpture.

A Quebecois painter, watercolourist, and printmaker based in Montreal during most of his career. He is best known for his detailed, quaint depictions of the St. Lawrence Valley and its surrounding landscapes. Fortin had a particular interest in capturing the rural villages and lifestyles of Quebec’s countryside and was highly influenced by the work of French painter Jean-François Millet (1814–1875).

An Ottawa-based artist, educator, and administrator best known for his realistic prints and painted portraits. In the 1890s Fosbery studied under Canadian artist Franklin Brownell and then briefly in Paris. He was wounded while serving in the First World War and was instrumental in helping to establish Canadian war art programs. Fosbery was president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) from 1943 to 1946.

A found object can be any object—natural or fabricated, whole or fragmentary—taken up by an artist and integrated into an artwork. Artists working with found objects may focus on particular types or styles, personal or cultural meaning, or formal elements in choosing what to include in their work. An example is Picasso’s Bull’s Head, 1942, made of a bicycle seat and handlebars. 

The concept of a higher spatial dimension beyond our immediate perception influenced major movements in early twentieth-century modern art, including Cubism, Futurism, and Suprematism. In Cubism, the fourth dimension is visualized through the simultaneous representation of three-dimensional objects from different viewpoints. Kazimir Malevich, the founder of Suprematism, articulated this higher dimension by painting geometric planes moving through infinite space.

Initially known as a photographer, Frampton is now largely remembered for his theoretical writings and experimental, non-narrative films. He was also an influential teacher of film, film history, photography, and design, holding posts at various institutions in the New York area during the last twenty-five years of his life.

Joseph-Charles Franchère was a painter, illustrator, and decorator of Quebec churches who was trained in the academic tradition in Paris. Inspired by Symbolism, his work often presents an idealized image of pastoral life. He illustrated, among other works, The Riots (1916) of Father Lionel Groulx. His works were chosen to represent Canada at the World’s Fairs in Chicago (1893), Buffalo (1901), and St. Louis (1904).

Associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, Francis was a painter and printmaker. He studied art at the University of California, Berkley, before moving to Paris in 1950, where he met and was influenced by the Quebec artist Jean Paul Riopelle. Francis returned to California in 1962. His paintings relied on a rich, evocative use of colour, moving from centrally placed shapes through an emphasis on white space to fluid forms and drips as his career progressed. As a printmaker and publisher, Francis ran a lithography studio and Lapis Press, dedicated to artists’ books. He helped establish a California style of modernist painting and was involved in the organization of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, in 1980.

Born in the Netherlands, Franck immigrated to Canada following the First World War. He is known for his watercolours and oil paintings of Toronto streets and houses. Franck was an important influence on Painters Eleven.

A Swiss American documentary photographer and filmmaker who worked as a photojournalist for American magazines such as Life and Vogue. He is best known for his photographic book The Americans, which was published in 1958 to controversy, as it presented candid, unvarnished images of post-war American society taken by Frank during his travels across the country and addressed issues such as race and class divisions. From the 1970s, Frank divided his time between New York and Mabou, Nova Scotia.

A New York School artist who developed specific techniques to create atmospheric effects in her paintings, including blotting and staining unprepared canvas with thin pigments. Frankenthaler also experimented with woodcuts, colour printing, and sculpture.

The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research was founded in Germany in 1923 and is considered the first Western institution devoted to concepts of social democracy derived from the theories of philosopher Karl Marx and sociologist Max Weber. Theorists associated with the school, such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, analyzed social and economic systems through a Marxist lens. This approach became known more broadly as “critical theory.”

A Wisconsin-born artist, curator, and educator known for her expressive, highly detailed style of painting and drawing, with a focus on portraits and landscapes. She earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota before moving to Halifax, where she taught drawing at the Technical University of Nova Scotia and served as the Acting Director of the Dalhousie Art Gallery. She was inducted to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1976.

A painter, photographer, illustrator, and art teacher born in England. Upon immigrating to Canada around 1860, John Arthur Fraser began painting studio backdrops for photographer William Notman, becoming a partner in Notman’s Toronto firm in 1867.

Daniel (Danny) Freedman was an actor who lived at 78 Gerrard Street West with AA Bronson, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and Mimi Paige. He was a judge of The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, 1971, a performance held at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

The practices and institutions of the Free and Accepted Masons (Freemasons), the oldest and largest secret society in the world. Bound by oaths and devoted to fellowship, moral discipline, and mutual assistance, the Freemasons arose from medieval stonemason guilds and draw on an elaborate system of hierarchies, rituals, and symbols.

Eric Freifeld was a Russian-born figurative painter and influential instructor at the Ontario College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design University), where he taught drawing and served as chair of the fine arts department. He initially gained recognition in Edmonton, where he had moved with his mother and sister at the age of five. Freifeld’s interests and output were broad, but he is perhaps best known for a series of structural, minutely detailed watercolours that placed him among the leading Canadian artists of his generation. A 1986 retrospective exhibition at the Rodman Hall Art Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto was organized following his death in 1984.

A mid-twentieth-century cultural movement that manifested in literature, film, and philosophy, French existentialism is popularly associated with the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Its main ideas are that human existence is essentially inexplicable and meaningless and that human beings are free and independent actors.

The foremost American monumental sculptor of the early twentieth century, French is best known for designing the statue of Abraham Lincoln, 1920, in the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC. He first gained acclaim for The Minute Man, 1871–75, a commemorative monument in the Beaux-arts aesthetic commissioned by the town of Concord, Massachusetts. Over the course of his sixty-year career, French created allegorical and historical figures and portrait statues in a style that infused Neoclassism with naturalism.

A mostly figurative painter and photographer, and an important member of the Depression-era gay artistic community. He was a member of the PaJaMa photographic collective along with his wife, Margaret Hoening, and his lover Paul Cadmus. He was deeply interested in Carl Jung’s psychoanalytical theories and suggested that his paintings be viewed in light of Jung’s writings.

Internationally recognized, Bratislava-born, Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist and writer. Prominent first for her work in printmaking and sculpture, Vera Frenkel has been at the forefront of contemporary media art since the 1970s. Her work has been presented at major museums and festivals throughout the world. She is a Professora Emerita at York University in the Department of Visual Arts and Art History, School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design. Frenkel is a recipient of major honours, including the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2005.

A Franciscan friar, painter, and architect, and the best-known of the artists of his religious order who travelled to New France. Luc arrived in New France in 1670, and planned the new chapel of the Récollets as well as made several church paintings.

An ancient painting technique that is often used to create wall murals. After a section of a wall is covered in wet plaster, paint is applied. As it dries, the paint absorbs into the plaster and becomes a permanent part of the wall. This technique was notably used in the Italian Renaissance by masters such as Giotto and Michelangelo.

Italian for “dry fresco,” a wall-painting technique where colour pigments are mixed with a binding agent and applied to dry plaster on the wall. The pigments are less durable and the paint may flake off over time, but artists do not have to work as quickly as they do with buon fresco and are more easily able to touch up their murals.

A figurative painter equally influenced by Surrealism, New Objectivity, and Ingres’s variety of French classicism, Freud nonetheless remained apart from any contemporary art movement. A grandson of Sigmund Freud, he produced an intensely personal body of work, with his models selected from his own family and immediate circle. Similarities can be drawn between his work and that of painter Francis Bacon.

A painter, illustrator, and graphic designer, Frey painted portraits and landscapes influenced by Symbolism. He was a member of the Dresden Art Cooperative and taught at the Dresden Academy of Arts and Crafts.

A prominent modernist art and literary critic, art historian, and poet, Fried was a formalist who differentiated between the artwork itself, the experience of viewing the artwork, and the socio-political context in which it was made. His 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” is a well-known piece of art criticism examining Minimalist art. He later abandoned art criticism to write about the history of early modernism. He teaches in the Humanities Department at Johns Hopkins University.

A New York City art gallery owner, Rose Fried took over the Pinacoteca Gallery in the 1940s, changing its name to Rose Fried Gallery in 1944. An advocate for abstract art, she introduced the work of European abstractionists including Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky to an American public. Fried also represented Cubist, Futurist, and Latin American modernist artists.

One of the major Romantic painters, and the most exemplary of the movement’s German practitioners. Friedrich’s dramatic landscapes—seascapes and mountains, forests and farmland—are both realistic and symbolic, painted in meticulous detail but expressive of the artist’s deeply held mystical and spiritual beliefs.

Architectural term for the entablature between the architrave and cornice of a building. Also employed as an ornamental border on furniture and walls. In painting the term may denote a pictorial element consisting of a horizontal line of figures or objects.

A militant organization supporting Quebec sovereignty that was formed in 1963 by Raymond Villeneuve, Gabriel Hudon, and Georges Schoeters. The Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) emerged in response to major political and cultural shifts taking place in Quebec, as well as other revolutionary movements against foreign imperialism occurring around the world, notably in Algeria. The FLQ disbanded in 1971 following the arrest of multiple members linked to the October Crisis.

The art critic who coined the term “Post-Impressionism” to describe the work of the Parisian avant-garde painters of the early twentieth century, Fry was a British painter, writer, and member of the influential Bloomsbury group. Beginning his career specializing in the Old Masters, in 1906 he was appointed to the position of curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. After his return to England in 1910, his work on developing the formalist theory of art criticism, as well as promoting Post-Impressionism, had a major influence on the artistic tastes of the Anglophone world.

A literary critic and professor of English. Fry’s ideas about literature’s symbolic underpinnings influenced a generation of critics and writers including Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood. His focus on myth and archetypes as the basis of a literary universe of the imagination was best articulated in Anatomy of Criticism (1957).

An architect, systems theorist, and engineer, Richard Buckminster Fuller began his career working on technologies for modular housing but went on to develop futurist, utopian design propositions that attempted to address global issues of energy and industrialization. His experiments in geometry led to his invention of the geodesic dome, a form of construction the strength of which increases logarithmically in relation to its size and an icon of 1960s design both mainstream (the U.S. pavilion at Expo 67) and countercultural (Drop City, a southern Colorado artists’ community formed in 1965).

An American art movement originating in California in the 1960s in response to the high-mindedness of Abstract Expressionism. Funk art’s figurative works may appear crude and irreverent. The movement combined unusual techniques and materials—significantly ceramics—often incorporating found objects from consumer culture into its cartoonish aesthetic. The name “Funk” was derived from “Funky,” a jazz music term which indicates the unconventional.

An experimental film collective and theatre located in Toronto from 1977 to 1989, dedicated to the production, distribution, and exhibition of 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm films. Many of its members were connected to the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), among them Funnel co-founder Ross McLaren.

A graphic artist, Furnival served as art director of Chatelaine magazine in 1952–53. During his tenure at the magazine, he frequently commissioned illustrator Oscar Cahén and is seen to have been an early supporter of Cahén’s career.

A New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer whose videos and performances address the politics of gender, race, and systems of power. Informed by postcolonial, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory, Fusco explores concepts of cultural otherness with a recent focus on Cuba. The recipient of several prestigious awards for her art and her writing, she is also a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.

Founded in 1909, this Italian movement in modern art and literature embraced elements of Cubism and Neo-Impressionism. The Futurist aesthetic idealized technological advances, war, dynamism, and the energy of modern life. Among the most renowned Futurist artists are Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo.

A Montreal artist who worked across a variety of media, including film, photography, collage, and box constructions, as well as painting. From 1956 to 1960 Gagnon studied in New York, immersing himself in the city’s avant-garde world of experimental art. Once he was back in Montreal his painting, especially his use of hard edges, was often associated with that of his Plasticien contemporaries.

Although he travelled and lived in Europe periodically throughout his career, Clarence Gagnon is best known for his paintings of the people and landscapes of his native Quebec, and particularly the Charlevoix region. A virtuosic colourist, Gagnon created highly original winter scenes in vivid hues, with generous play between light and dark. He is also known for illustrating books such as Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon (1913) and Le grand silence blanc by L.F. Rouquette (1928).

A writer, scholar, and professor recognized as one of Canada’s most prominent art historians. Born in Paris, Gagnon was based in Montreal and dedicated his career to the advancement and promotion of Quebec and Canadian art and art history. He taught at the Université de Montréal before later founding the Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University.

An art critic and teacher at Montreal’s École du meuble, Gagnon studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. His book Peinture moderne (1940) analyzes various schools of modern art, including religious art. He was a friend to luminaries of the French and Québecois avant-garde, including Fernand Léger and Paul-Émile Borduas.

Gagnon is a mixed-media artist who works primarily with carved plywood to create sculptural bas-reliefs layered with drawing, painting, and engraving techniques. She studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design (now OCAD University) and at Concordia University. Her works evoke the tension between natural and artificial states and are often reminiscent of aerial or topographical views of the landscape.

A leading British portrait painter of the second half of the eighteenth century, Gainsborough was known for the feathery quality of his brushwork. He had a well-known rivalry with the portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1768, Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

A commercial art gallery founded in Montreal in 1986 by René Blouin, and extant until 2020 when it merged with Division Gallery to form Galerie Blouin Division. One of the largest commercial galleries in Canada, it has promoted leading Canadian contemporary artists in both of its iterations.

An artist-run centre in Ottawa, Ontario, Galerie SAW Gallery was founded in 1973 by a group of Ottawa artists. Since 1989 it has been located in the Arts Court building in Ottawa’s ByWard Market neighbourhood, alongside SAW Video, with which it was once affiliated. SAW exhibits the work of emerging and established Canadian and international artists, with a focus on cultural diversity and politically engaged art.

An important part of the emergent Toronto art scene in the city’s Yorkville neighbourhood in the 1960s, Gallery Moos was founded in 1959 by Walter Moos, who remained its owner and director until his death in 2013. The gallery’s early exhibitions brought a mix of Canadian, American, and European artists to local audiences, with a focus on modernist work. It launched and sustained the careers of a generation of Toronto artists, including Sorel Etrog and Gershon Iskowitz. From 1982 to 1992 Gallery Moos operated an outpost in New York City, New York, expanding its reach into the American art scene. The gallery moved to what would be its final space, in Toronto’s Queen West Arts District, in 1992.

A realist painter and sculptor known for his painstaking process; a single small canvas can take him years to complete. His work is held by major art institutions around the world and was the subject of a retrospective exhibition in 2008 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Based on English town planner Ebenezer Howard’s model of the garden city, the garden city movement promoted the integration of natural and rural environments into town and city planning. Howard first described his model in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), in which he described a planned residential community surrounded by a broad greenbelt of agricultural and park space as an antidote to urban congestion. North American proponents included the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.; in England and Europe, it was associated with members of the Arts and Crafts movement including the architect Richard Barry Parker. Later planners adapted Howard’s principles to both large and small communities.

The George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art was opened by philanthropists George and Helen Gardiner in 1984 to house their extensive collection of pottery and ceramic art. The museum’s permanent collection holds over five thousand pieces from all over the world but emphasizes work by Canadian artists.

An Edmonton-born artist, curator, and educator, and a prominent voice in contemporary Indigenous art. Spanning painting, writing, and performance, David Garneau’s works explore themes like masculinity and his Métis identity and history. He has taught at the University of Regina since 1994 and in 2023 he had a retrospective at Nickel Galleries at the University of Calgary, his alma mater.

A painter of luminous Quebec landscapes and a writer credited with modernizing poetry in French Canada. As a student at Montreal’s École des beaux-arts (now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal) he was a friend of Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean Paul Lemieux, and other painters who would go on to define Quebec modernism. His own studies were cut short by his fragile health.

John H. Garo was born in Harpoot, in then Turkish Armenia, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1885. He became a portrait photographer after settling in Boston. Garo was revered in his time—a renaissance man and debonair figure who made celebrated subjects like President Calvin Coolidge feel at ease in his studio. His photographs are held by the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

An internationally recognized abstract painter and printmaker, associated with the Plasticiens. Gaucher’s inquisitive nature made him an individualistic figure and artist who drew from many sources, including jazz and atonal music, Georges Braque, Mark Rothko, and the New York Abstractionists. He fought to modernize printmaking and open the medium up to experimental and innovative techniques. Gaucher founded the Associations des peintures-gravures de Montréal in 1960 and was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1981. (See Yves Gaucher: Life & Work by Roald Nasgaard.)

A member—with Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne—of the group of painters now considered the Post-Impressionists, Gauguin is known for his use of colour and symbolism and for his daring compositions. The paintings he made in Tahiti, representing an idealized “primitive” culture, are among his most famous.

A playwright, poet, and polemicist known for contributing greatly to modernist theatre in Quebec, Gauvreau was a leader of the Automatistes and signatory of the 1948 manifesto Refus global. His writing is characterized by poetic abstraction and expression, such as his first play, Bien-être, written in 1947 for his muse and lover, Muriel Guilbault.

An important figure in the history of Canadian decorative arts and design, Gauvreau helped transform Montreal’s École technique into the École du meuble. The school became a centre for Quebec’s avant-garde, drawing artists like Paul-Émile Borduas and others associated with the 1948 Refus global manifesto.

An abstract painter, writer, and film and television producer born and based in Montreal. He was best known as a member of Les Automatistes, a group of Quebecois artists who opposed the formality and restrictions of academic and figurative art, advocating for more fluid, unconscious techniques in painting and drawing. His paintings are characterized by striking brushstrokes and bright, melded colours.

American-born artist who in 1924 began an appointment at the Winnipeg School of Art, where he served as principal for five years.  Gebhardt painted local scenes of piano bars and Winnipeg neighbourhoods, often sketching with Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. Like FitzGerald, he designed sets for the Community Players of Winnipeg amateur theatre group. He later turned to creating museum dioramas, models, and exhibits, and moved back to the United States in 1932 to work at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

The dominant process used to create black and white images for more than a century. Gelatin prints, in which light-sensitive silver salts are bound by a gelatin solution, began to replace albumen prints in the 1890s. Their stability and ease of manufacture contributed to their success, and the characteristic smooth image surface was valued by both amateur and professional photographers.

A multimedia artist influenced early in his artistic development by the London Regionalist artists, whose work surrounded him in his adopted hometown. Geleynse worked in printmaking, painting, and photography before coming to concentrate on 3-D model making, film, and video, which he frequently integrates into large-scale installations.

A prolific, provocative, and socially critical artist collective comprising of AA Bronson (Michael Tims, b.1946), Felix Partz (Ronald Gabe, 1945–1994), and Jorge Zontal (Slobodan Saia-Levy, 1944–1994). General Idea formed in Toronto out of the countercultural scenes of the experimental free school Rochdale College and Theatre Passe Muraille. Their conceptual projects included those associated with Miss General Idea and series dealing with the AIDS crisis. The collective founded FILE in 1972 and the artist-run centre Art Metropole in 1973. (See General Idea: Life & Work  by Sarah E.K. Smith.)

This term refers to paintings that depict scenes of everyday life. Genre paintings were first popularized in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, and typical subject matter includes domestic chores, rural life, and socializing.

The only female follower of Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi was a Baroque painter. She is especially known for her religious scenes and depictions of female figures of the Old Testament, including Bathsheba and Judith. Gentileschi was the first woman to be inducted into the Florentine Academy of the Arts of Drawing (now the Academy of Fine Arts) and was a prominent artist during her lifetime, benefiting from the patronage of the Medici duke Cosimo II. However, after her death she fell into obscurity, and it is only recently that scholars have begun to address the importance of her work.

Based on the concept of geometry as an overt or underlying principle in art or design, geometricism involves an exploration of the way geometric forms and relationships can be used to create an illusion of dimensionality on a surface. This objective may involve the creation of optical illusions or, as employed by the Cubists, the reduction of forms to geometric elements that emphasize their relationship in space.

An academic painter and favourite pupil of Jacques-Louis David, Gérard found success at the 1796 Paris Salon with his picture of Jean-Baptiste Isabey and his daughter; he subsequently became the most sought-after society portraitist in France.

Géricault was a French Romantic painter best known for The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19, a monumental painting depicting the aftermath of a notorious contemporary shipwreck. His lifestyle—he was a noted dandy and adventurous equestrian—and his subject matter—he favoured scenes of high drama, psychological pain, and equine athleticism—exemplified the Romantic artistic personality. Géricault’s work had an enduring influence despite his short life and career and the initial public discomfort with his work’s intensity. Though largely self-taught, he shared a teacher with Eugène Delacroix, the most renowned of French Romantic painters, and his style had a formative effect on the latter’s work.

A student of Fernand Léger’s at the Académie Moderne in Paris in 1931 and of Wassily Kandinsky’s at the Bauhaus in 1932, Germain was an abstract painter. He was a member of the Lyrical Abstraction group in Paris, which for a time included the Quebec artist Jean Paul Riopelle. Germain’s paintings feature dynamic, rectangular applications of paint, often shades of white, with bursts of vibrant colour.

A modernist movement in painting, sculpture, theatre, literature, and cinema. Expressionism’s birth is often traced to 1905, when Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of Dresden painters, broke with the practices and institutions of the academy and bourgeois culture, declaring themselves a “bridge” to the future. Another bold new group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), formed in 1911, focused more on the spiritual in art. Significant Expressionist painters include Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and Egon Schiele.

A physician, naturalist, and polymath, and a compiler of one of Renaissance Zurich’s most important libraries. Gessner was a professor of natural history and ethics at the Reformed-Protestant theological college in Zurich. Among his most important scientific texts is the Historiae Animalium (1551–58, 1587), a richly illustrated five-volume study of the animal kingdom.