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Art Canadian

Plasticiens and Beyond, The

Montréal, 1955-1970

edited by Roald Nasgaard & Michel Martin

Publisher
Douglas & McIntyre
Initial publish date
Feb 2013
Category
Canadian, Contemporary (1945-)
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781771004343
    Publish Date
    Feb 2013
    List Price
    $59.95

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Description

The bestselling author of Abstract Painting in Canada explores one of Canada's only avant-garde movements, The Plasticiens.

By the mid-1950s, young Montreal artists were turning their backs on the surrealist spontaneity of the Automatistes. Painting in Montreal paralleled the New York pattern of following the "hot" of Abstract Expression with the "cool" of Post-painterly Abstraction. But Montreal produced a late Modernist practice markedly distinct and independent from New York's -- a movement known as The Plasticiens.

Sumptuously illustrated, this volume features seventy-five paintings by Louis Belzile, Charles Gagnon, Yves Gaucher, Jean Goguen, Jauran (Rodolphe de Repentigny), Jean-Paul Jérôme, Denis Juneau, Fernand Leduc, Guido Molinari, Fernand Toupin, and Claude Tousignant.

About the authors

Roald Nasgaard (MA, University of British Columbia; PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Professor of Art History, and, for the past decade, Chair of the Art Department at Florida State University, began his teaching career at the University of Guelph in 1971. In the years between, before returning to academia, he had a long and distinguished museum career. From 1975 to 1978 he served as Curator of Contemporary Art and then, until 1993, as Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Among the many exhibition catalogues he authored are Yves Gaucher: A Fifteen-Year Perspective (1979); Structures for Behaviour: New Sculptures by Robert Morris, David Rabinowich, Richard Serra and George Trakas (1978); The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940 (1984); Gerhard Richter: Paintings (1988); and Pleasures of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Painting Since 1990 (2001). Other major curatorial projects at the AGO include The European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today (1985) and Free Worlds: Metaphors and Realities in Contemporary Hungarian Art. Nasgaard has held several Canada Council fellowships and grants as well as a Research Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives (2002). He won an OAAG Curatorial Writing Award in 1991 for his essay in Individualités: 14 Contemporary Artists from France. Nasgaard was born in Denmark and is a Canadian citizen.

Roald Nasgaard's profile page

Michel Martin was the curator of contemporary art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec from 1978 to 2008. His many exhibitions include John Heward: A Trajectory, Fernand Leduc: Freeing the Light, and Yves Gaucher: Recurrences.

Michel Martin's profile page

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