Lot # 001
HAROLD BARLING TOWN
CGP CPE CSGA OC OSA P11 RCA 1924 - 1990 Canadian

Two Years Before the Last
oil and lucite 44 on board,
signed and dated 1959 and on verso titled and dated on a label
24 1/4 x 24 1/4 in,  61.6 x 61.6 cm

Provenance:
The Isaacs Gallery Ltd., Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

The members of Painters Eleven differed in their ages, styles and approaches to art. They had in common their shared interest in creating something new and their geographic association of Toronto. They came together in 1953, with Harold Town being the second youngest of this disparate group. Town was an incredibly diverse artist who worked in many media, and whose work pushed the limits of abstract art in each media he explored to its fullest extent. His work in oil is characterized by varied and often busy patterns, the use of collage elements and rough, rock-like surfaces. His quirky colours and brilliant hues are often used in opposition to one another as they are in this work; these are colours that speak boldly of Canadian abstract art in the 1950s and 1960s. Town's calligraphic mark-making and incised scoring of partially dry paint recall ancient, ruined buildings. This contrast of the modern and the ancient results in an interesting juxtaposition of medium and message.

Sold For: $11,700.00 CAD
Estimate: $12,000 ~ $15,000 CAD

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Lot # 002
RITA LETENDRE
ARCA OC QMG 1928 - Canadian

Projection
oil on canvas,
signed and dated 1964 and on verso signed, titled and dated
8 x 10 in,  20.3 x 25.4 cm

Provenance:
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:
Sandra Paikowsky, Rita Letendre: The Montreal Years 1953 - 1963, Concordia Art Gallery, 1989, page 32

During the early 1960s, Rita Letendre began to create fiery paintings erupting with thick, undulating texture and bold colour combinations. Consequently, she garnered great critical and commercial success that led to traveling to Paris in 1962 with Ulysse Comtois on a Canada Council grant, then moving onwards to Rome and Israel before returning to Canada in the fall of 1963. With regard to Letendre's travels, Sandra Paikowsky writes, "The new sobriety, the new angst and the emphatic dualism of light and colour were all reflections of her experiences in different cultural environments and geographic locales." Executed in 1964 as a result of such experiences, Projection is a small yet dramatic painting with vibrant red and vivid green pushing against the masses of black with great confidence. Furthermore, the works produced shortly after her trip are regarded as the beginnings of her geometric works of the late 1960s and 1970s. Projection still reflects the dynamic abstraction of the Automatists, yet given the title and horizontal lines, this work is a clear predecessor to the flat, hard-edged works that were to follow.

Sold For: $12,870.00 CAD
Estimate: $9,000 ~ $12,000 CAD

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Lot # 003
THOMAS SHERLOCK HODGSON
CGP CSPWC OSA P11 RCA 1924 - 2006 Canadian

Thelonious at the Five Spot #1
oil on canvas,
signed and dated 1963 and on verso titled and inscribed "Riverside"
50 x 50 in,  127 x 127 cm

Provenance:
Private Collection, British Columbia

Thelonious at the Five Spot #1 is a direct representation of the energy that had newly emerged onto the Toronto arts scene with the success of Painters Eleven. After the group's official disbandment in 1960, Tom Hodgson continued to display his flair for Abstract Expressionism and for hosting social gatherings - this work being a combination of both talents. Hodgson's studio, the Pit, was the unofficial party quarters during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s for Hodgson and his painter friends. During one notably interesting evening at the Pit, one of Hodgson's studio models stood in front of a slide show frame while his colourful abstract images were projected onto her body as she danced to the jazz music of famous pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. The title refers to Monk's recordings at the famous Five Spot Café in New York. This legendary jazz club was a popular haunt for artists, and Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell were regulars. Hodgson had his own distinct visual rhythm, which is clearly manifest in this work through broad brush-strokes, varied textures and a sense of spontaneity.

Sold For: $14,040.00 CAD
Estimate: $12,000 ~ $16,000 CAD

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Lot # 004
HAROLD BARLING TOWN
CGP CPE CSGA OC OSA P11 RCA 1924 - 1990 Canadian

No Sun
oil and lucite 44 on board,
signed and dated 1959 and on verso signed, dated and inscribed "oil on lucite 44 - use no turps in cleaning, Caution signature will float, Signed in blue on surface Town 59, signed 16-12-70"
30 x 24 in,  76.2 x 61 cm

Provenance:
Private Collection, British Columbia

The members of Painters Eleven were successful at creating their own artistic identities before their official parting in 1960. It was during the significant Painters Eleven time period that Harold Town's multiple artistic abilities clearly emerged as printmaker, painter and sculptor. He was an artistic tour de force, simultaneously working in various mediums with incredible vigour. In 1959, this energy was filtered primarily into painting and, as a result, his paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s are considered to be his most inspired. No Sun is an exemplary work from this period, with Town's gestural brushwork highlighted by brilliant, unpredictable juxtapositions of colour. The work is highly expressive - characteristic of Town's abstract paintings from this time - yet still maintains a consciously determined design with the definitive strokes near the perimeter successfully harnessing the storm of intense colours within. Although Town's artistic identity would continue to evolve in the years to follow, it is works such as No Sun that so superbly capture his relentless energy and talents.

Sold For: $23,400.00 CAD
Estimate: $20,000 ~ $30,000 CAD

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Lot # 005
JEAN ALBERT MCEWEN
AANFM RCA 1923 - 1999 Canadian

Miroir sans image / rouge-orangé - no. 9
oil on canvas,
signed and dated 1971 and on verso signed, titled and dated
30 x 30 in,  76.2 x 76.2 cm

Provenance:
Galerie Agnès Lefort, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal

Literature:
Constance Naubert-Riser, Jean McEwen: Colour in Depth, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1987, page 48

The year 1971 was an important one for Jean McEwen. After he had devoted four years to the acrylic medium, an exhibition at the Galerie Godard Lefort in Montreal showcased his triumphant return to oil painting with the Miroir sans image series. The oil medium allowed McEwen to create depths that acrylic could not. In Miroir sans image / rouge-orangé - no. 9, seductive shades of red are anchored by dark green at the perimeter and rich yellow squares in all corners. Thus the work excludes any subject matter, and the title only further reinforces the elimination of any extraneous narrative. Miroir sans image translates as "Imageless Mirror" and, as alluded to, in no way does the surface become physically reflective. Constance Naubert-Riser writes of the series: "This is painting that reflects nothing from the outside, painting that is nothing but painting, nothing but colour, variegated and stratified." Such colour illustrates the dichotomy of this classic McEwen - pulling the viewer into the magnetic, bountiful depths but also drawing us back to the surface by the chromatic and wondrous gleam of the gold - thus exemplifying McEwen's important contribution to formalism and the painterly approach.

Sold For: $70,200.00 CAD
Estimate: $30,000 ~ $50,000 CAD

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Lot # 006
RITA LETENDRE
ARCA OC QMG 1928 - Canadian

Sans titre
oil on canvas,
signed and dated 1961
14 1/8 x 12 1/8 in,  35.9 x 30.8 cm

Provenance:
Galerie Soixante, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal

After the ground-breaking Refus Global was published in 1948 and with the subsequent progression of the Automatists in Montreal, abstract art was being increasingly exhibited in the city. As a result, the public and art institutions gained more knowledge and gradually became well acquainted with non-figurative art. This growing acceptance and appreciation set the stage for Rita Letendre's rising success in the early 1960s, which included exhibiting at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Musée du Québec in 1961 and, in the years to follow, traveling to Paris, Rome and Israel. The timing for success in Montreal was ripe, and Sans titre is a reflection of her commitment and dedication to the pulsating, vigorous abstraction of the Automatist movement. In 1961 - a pivotal year for Letendre - her most inspired and coveted works began to emerge, paintings bursting with thick impasto and zones of bright, turbulent colour - qualities that explode from Sans titre. The tonal composition of the vibrant green, cool white and deep orange against the dark background is the product of gestural strokes by Letendre's powerful, yet ever so rhythmical, palette knife.

Sold For: $16,380.00 CAD
Estimate: $10,000 ~ $15,000 CAD

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Lot # 007
MICHAEL JAMES ALECK SNOW
OC RCA 1928 - Canadian

Walking Woman
oil on unstretched canvas,
62 x 19 3/4 in,  157.5 x 50.2 cm

Provenance:
The Isaacs Gallery Ltd., Toronto
Private Collection, Montreal

Michael Snow's iconic Walking Woman works are emblematic of the Toronto Pop Art scene in the 1960s. Based on ideas generated from a cardboard cut-out of the walking woman form, which he created as part of a series intended to consist only of five or six works, Snow became interested in the possibilities that this large form presented as a stencil. His explorations of it were many and inventive, and were the sole focus of his work for a period of six years. On canvas and paper, flat sheets of metal and glass, and as a subject for film, she was folded, cut out, draped on dowels, silkscreened into prints and reproduced on T-shirts. She is always the same, yet always different, whether she was painted, sculpted, laser-cut in steel or taken out and placed into the public environment. Whether elongated, distorted, reversed in a mirror image, expanded or shrunk in this iconic series of works, her image challenges our perception of the human form.

Sold For: $52,650.00 CAD
Estimate: $45,000 ~ $65,000 CAD

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Lot # 008
GORDON APPELBE SMITH
BCSFA CGP CPE OC RCA 1919 - Canadian

Untitled
oil on canvas,
signed and on verso dated December 1964 on a gallery label
44 x 40 in,  111.7 x 101.6 cm

Provenance:
The New Design Gallery Ltd., Vancouver
Private Collection, Toronto

In 1960, Gordon Smith was chosen to represent Canada at the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; he also toured England and Europe. While visiting museums, he was drawn to artists for whom colour, mood and light were the focus, particularly J.M.W. Turner. Smith pulled this thread into his abstract work, which he had begun in 1951 after studying with abstract painter Elmer Bischoff at the California School of Fine Arts. At that time, the work of the Abstract Expressionists had made him keenly aware of the qualities of paint itself and the gestural act of painting. Smith meshed together what interested him from these disparate artists into a synthesis of his own. By the mid-1960s, Smith was using colour in a bold way, as seen in this hot and sensuous palette of red, orange and gold. In this extraordinarily sensitive and poetic work, an abstracted relationship between figure and ground is explored, using softly layered, glowing colour fields. Drawn lines intersect and emphasize form, rather than defining it. Smith's continual drive to evolve makes him one of Canada's most important early modernist painters.

Sold For: $29,250.00 CAD
Estimate: $20,000 ~ $30,000 CAD

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Lot # 009
JACK HAMILTON BUSH
ARCA CGP CSGA CSPWC OSA P11 1909 - 1977 Canadian

Sing, Sing, Sing (BG 38)
acrylic on canvas,
on verso signed, titled and dated December 1974
68 x 114 3/4 in,  172.7 x 291.4 cm

Provenance:
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:
Karen Wilkin, editor, Jack Bush, 1984, "Wendy Brunelle Talks with Jack Bush, January 1977", page 197

In 1974 Jack Bush began to paint musical themes explicitly. Music - jazz especially - had been important to his art for years, but here the connection is unequivocal and celebratory. By titling this magisterial canvas after the famous Benny Goodman big band tune of 1938, Bush was not only acknowledging the affinity of musical and painterly improvisation but also his longstanding fidelity to Henri Matisse's explicitly musical compositions such as contained in Jazz, his artist's book of 1947. As Matisse's paper cut-outs do, Bush's highly coloured forms move with freedom, elegance and purpose.
Bush was a consummately visual artist - a master of colour, rhythm, texture and timing. This is not primarily a painting about music, or about Goodman, or even about Bush's mood as he worked (he has said that he did not listen to the songs or instruments referenced in his titles as he painted - works such as Woodwind [1976], Mood Indigo [1976] and Basin Street Blues [1975]). The painting is not an illustration but a visual experience. While the surface soars in all respects, Bush at this time planned his large canvases with coloured preparatory drawings, including the all-important key colour of the ground, which he often laid in with chalk.
Just as the artist looked and thought hard as he applied the richly coloured and variegated ground and placed his colour "notes", we can best derive satisfaction and insight from this canvas by attending to its details. In the grouped colour bars that parade across the top left, we see repetitions of hues (two yellows, two reds, several greens), but the shades of each tint are always different. Nothing is mechanical or made by system, but rather, carefully improvised. If we think of these colours as accents, the lone hard white just off centre in this group is a remarkable punctuation. As these forms rise from left to right, they also separate into free, solo marks. Reading from left to right, the last bar in the sequence appears almost as a negative form, given that its colour is very close to that of the ground. Noticing this subtle but important gesture about the painting's materiality can also lead us to see that Bush left an uneven edge around the entire painted surface, a revealing space between what he painted and the physical frame of the work.
This irregular threshold again declares that the painting is made of pigment on a ground, a pragmatic assertion also characteristic of the prominent American abstractionists of critic Clement Greenberg's post-painterly abstraction generation, of whom Bush was a prominent member. From the 1960s until his death in 1977, he exhibited with American artists such as Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Helen Frankenthaler. He was in all ways their equal. As a composer in colour, he was unequalled.
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the work of Jack Bush, being prepared by Sarah Stanners in cooperation with the National Gallery of Canada. Stanners will also be co~curating a Jack Bush retrospective exhibition with Marc Mayer at the National Gallery of Canada, scheduled to open in October 2014.
We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, for contributing the above essay.

Sold For: $234,000.00 CAD
Estimate: $130,000 ~ $160,000 CAD

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Lot # 010
LISE GERVAIS
QMG 1933 - 1998 Canadian

Les sentinelles
oil on canvas,
signed and dated 1964 and on verso titled on a label
48 1/4 x 60 1/4 in,  122.5 x 153 cm

Provenance:
Acquired directly from the Artist by the present
Private Collection, Montreal

Lise Gervais was interested in the possibilities inherit in paint, and used the palette knife to apply broad swathes of colour to her canvases. Choosing pure, brilliant pigments, she allowed very little blending to occur in her work, thus her colours are incredibly rich. In Les sentinelles, this attention to the wonder of colour is enhanced by the visible, varying depth of the paint layers in areas of consistent colouration which have been applied against white, enhancing their brilliance and translucency. Gervais sometimes titled her works with reference to their bold colours, further underlining her interest in this aspect of her art. Quebec-born, she was inextricably linked to the Automatists in her approach and ideals, so much so that Jean-Paul Riopelle collected her work. Gervais was a respected teacher who, after studying at the École des beaux-arts in the late 1950s, went on to teach there herself in the 1960s. She also taught at Concordia University and the University of Quebec at Montreal.

Sold For: $38,025.00 CAD
Estimate: $20,000 ~ $30,000 CAD

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