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Jeffrey Spalding C.M, R.C.A.
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PHOTO: Private collection, California, included in the 1953 show at VAG, "Winnipeg Group"
"Kinetograph #22" (Spissitude)
Richard Bowman, "Kinetograph #22" (Spissitude), 1952, enamel and fluorescent paint. PHOTO: Private collection, California, included in the 1953 show at VAG, "Winnipeg Group"
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PHOTO: From the permanent collection of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Marie Eccles Caine Foundation Gift
"Kinetograph #5"
Richard Bowman, "Kinetograph #5", 1950, oil and fluorescent lacquer. PHOTO: From the permanent collection of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Marie Eccles Caine Foundation Gift
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PHOTO: Collection University of Lethbridge - Gift of Takao Tanabe
"Kinetograph #12"
Richard Bowman,"Kinetograph #12", 1951, 49.5cm / 19.5in x 61cm / 24in. Intaglio, etching. PHOTO: Collection University of Lethbridge - Gift of Takao Tanabe
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COURTESY OF THE BOWMAN FAMILY
"Kinetograph #13"
Richard Bowman, "Kinetograph #13", 1951, lacquer and fluorescent paint on panel, 68" x 48". COURTESY OF THE BOWMAN FAMILY
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PHOTO: Courtesy of the Bowman Family and 1212 Gallery, San Francisco.
"Kinetograph #16"
Richard Bowman, "Kinetograph #16", 1951, Lacquer and fluorescent paint on panel. 98" x 51", PHOTO: Courtesy of the Bowman Family and 1212 Gallery, San Francisco.
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"Kinetograph #20"
Richard Bowman, "Kinetograph #20" 1952, enamel and fluorescent paint, whereabouts unknown, included in May 9 to June 18 1952, 69th Annual Spring exhibition of paintings, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal as: #90 Kinetograph 20 $450 Jury II prize 1967-9, oil and fluorescent lacquer 40 x 41 (collection Robert C. Dinkenman M.D. Detroit); (This work received the painting prize in the modern portion or the exhibition).
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PHOTO: Private collection, California, included in the 1953 show at VAG, "Winnipeg Group"
"Kinetograph #22" (Spissitude)
Richard Bowman, "Kinetograph #22" (Spissitude), 1952, enamel and fluorescent paint. PHOTO: Private collection, California, included in the 1953 show at VAG, "Winnipeg Group"
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DONATED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE ART GALLERY BY TAKEO AND SAKAYE HIROSE OF WINNIPEG IN 1989. PHOTO: JANE EDMUNDSON
"Fragment 11 White-Eyed Monster"
Takao Tanabe, "Fragment 11 White-Eyed Monster", 1952, enamel on masonite, 24" x 48". DONATED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE ART GALLERY BY TAKEO AND SAKAYE HIROSE OF WINNIPEG IN 1989. PHOTO: JANE EDMUNDSON
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COLLECTION OF GALLERY ONE ONE ONE, UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA
"Bird in a Bush"
Richard Williams, "Bird in a Bush", 1953, welded steel with walnut base. COLLECTION OF GALLERY ONE ONE ONE, UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA
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"Trinity"
William Ashby McCloy, "Trinity", 1954. Whereabouts unknown
In the early ‘50s, between the Automatistes and Painters 11, Winnipeg Abstraction ruled the roost!
Interest in the history of abstract art abounds. We marked the centenary of the birth of fauvism and cubism, as well as Kandinsky’s seminal expressionist inventions. A recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition celebrated the glories of abstract expressionism. In Canada, a resurgence of critical attention upon the topic, anchored magnificently by Roald Nasgaard’s monograph, Abstract Painting in Canada, generated a flurry of books, articles and exhibitions. Many re-examined this history, and most focused attention on Quebec’s Automatistes and Toronto’s Painters Eleven (P11).
But lost amidst all the celebrations is a fact less well-recalled. In 1950, four years prior to the formation of P11, the leading edge of adventurous experimentation in abstract art hailed from neither Montreal nor Toronto (nor for that matter Regina). Rather, the action was in Winnipeg.
In fall 1950, The Winnipeg School of Art merged to become the School of Art, University of Manitoba (UM). Formerly solely a diploma program, the new UM department inaugurated the first BFA degree program in western Canada (Mount Allison was the only other Canadian university offering a BFA). To found the program, they enticed four recent MFA graduates from the University of Iowa to form the faculty — William McCloy, Richard Bowman, John Kacere and Robert Gadbois. Their principal instructor, legendary printmaker Mauricio Lasansky, imparted a humanist imprint upon generations of students such as David Hockney as well as western Canadian notable John Will. Roloff Beny received his MFA 1947 at Iowa, while Kacere was finishing his BFA there. Beny’s abstract art bears the unmistakable stamp of Lasansky and Stanley Hayter’s surrealist abstraction.
They were joined by British modernist sculptor Cecil Richards. Roland Wise was added to the staff, along with Robert Nelson and another Iowa grad, Richard Williams. The faculty established impressive careers as professional artists, exhibiting frequently at distinguished national and international institutions. They all shared a commitment to surrealist-inspired abstraction and explored experimental media — enamel, fluorescent and new space-age paints. They conducted public workshops, offering instruction in the use of modern media, published technical papers, and offered numerous lectures and forums advocating the value of abstraction to the general public. Their brash, large-scale work often was banded together as a group for exhibitions and critique. Abstract modernism, as well as surrealism is an entrenched legacy of Winnipeg art.
Takao Tanabe was granted use of a UM studio from fall 1950 and into 1951. He apprenticed in etching with Kacere and Bowman, printing the editions of some Bowman prints. Tanabe acquired a 1951 Bowman painting as well as the print K12 (subsequently gifted to the University of Lethbridge). His own art was included in important exhibitions alongside the UM faculty.
Bowman’s fascinating life experiences are emblematic of the intriguing web of international connections accrued by members of the “Winnipeg Group”. He spent 1943 in Erongaricuaro, Mexico, an ancient village with a reputation for attracting international notables such as surrealists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Roberto Matta, André Breton, and exiled Russian communist theoretician Leon Trotsky. There, Bowman met British surrealist painter Gordon Onslow-Ford, a renowned lecturer, curator and chief spokesman for surrealism in North America. He welcomed many surrealist artists as guests to his home, and he and Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen published the influential surrealist magazine DYN with Erongaricuaro as base.
In New York in 1944, Onslow-Ford introduced Bowman to Fernand Leger, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Bowman returned to visit Onslow-Ford at Erongaricuaro in the summer of 1946. In 1948, Bowman became friends with Paul Brach and Miriam Schapiro, fellow MFA students at University of Iowa (subsequently recognized as contributors to second-generation abstract expressionism). Back in California in 1949 with Onslow-Ford, he was introduced to Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Matta. Bowman brought his wealth of interconnections with international modern art to the Winnipeg art community.
The UM artists exhibited to great acclaim at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1951. Pre-eminent critic Robert Ayre dubbed Bowman, Gadbois, Kacere and Tanabe “…a group of daring young men on the flying trapeze of surrealist abstraction” in the Montreal Daily Star. Ayre made special mention of Bowman’s audacious fluorescent and lacquer paintings:
"One of the most striking, is Richard Bowman's 'Flight', a sort of black sunburst in a field of pink and yellow, which may have been suggested by the explosion of a seed pod. It hasn't the sinister implications of Robert Gadbois' 'Substance of Terror,' whose color and shapes may remind you of Graham Sutherland, or his 'Escaping Shadow,' like a crumpled, entangled moth. Between these and John Kacere, whose ‘Image No: 5’ is solid and geometrical, comes Takao Tanabe, who seems to visualize a character as some unknown myth... They all add up to quite an adventure and a revelation of a burst of vitality in Winnipeg…”
The following year, Bowman won the prize in the Modern section of the MMFA spring exhibition amidst the heyday of automatiste abstraction in Montreal.
Winnipeg abstractionists including Fitzgerald, Kacere, McCloy, Wise and Tanabe were selected for the Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting in 1953 at the National Gallery of Canada. Tanabe and Bowman were chosen by the gallery for inclusion in the Canadian section of the Second Biennial of Modern Art in São Paulo in 1953, and as evidence of the ascending attention paid to their art, the Vancouver Art Gallery displayed Bowman, McCloy, Kacere, Wise and Richards under the banner "Winnipeg Group" in 1953, and Bowman, McCloy and Richards were grouped with Oscar Cahén for a show at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1954.
Despite inclusion in national and international exhibitions, where their work was greeted by acclaim and laudatory critical reception, relationships were not always smooth at home. In 1951, The Winnipeg Tribune reported that their “….43 modern pictures had caused anger, disgust and confusion among 85 percent of Winnipeg Art Gallery visitors.” McCloy and Bowman were forced to defend against the charge that their art was meaningless and their show “was nothing but a hoax.”
Kacere left for Florida 1953, while Bowman and McCloy toughed it out, remaining on faculty until the convocation of the first BFA graduating class (which included Harry Kiyooka) in spring of 1954. That year, a Winnipeg Free Press headline told it all: “It’s Too Cold, Too Isolated, So Art Teachers Quit City.” McCloy left for Connecticut, Bowman to California, and Nelson to North Dakota.
Stanford University Art Gallery mounted a Bowman retrospective in 1956 and subsequently, so did the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1961 and 1970. Meanwhile, in Canada, the Winnipeg Group was disappearing from memory. Tanabe is the only Winnipeg artist included in the June 1956 National Gallery of Canada exhibition Canadian Abstract Painting. Jean-Rene Ostiguy wrote in his catalogue foreword:
“Painters in western Canada also in recent years have begun to show an interest in abstraction. However, there has been no group movement. …Takao Tanabe and Gordon Smith are the only truly non-representational painters from western Canada to be represented in this exhibition.”
The art of Winnipeg’s distinguished American ‘visiting’ faculty are nowhere to be found in the larger Canadian art museum collections. Published histories of the art of the period blissfully overlook the entire episode. It's a challenge today to even find any images of art from Bowman, McCloy, Kacere, Wise, Richards and Gadbois. Awareness of their impact upon Canada has passed out of mind. We need a fresh trail, direction to lead us back through time to re-discover clues to their forgotten whereabouts, because in this chapter of abstraction of the early 1950s, the daring young men in Winnipeg ruled the roost.
