“Naked Ladies’: The Nude in Canadian Modern Art, 1910-1950” by Devon Smither

28 Nov 2014 - 13:00 / 28 Nov 2014 - 15:00

University College 185
15 King’s College Circle
Toronto

The U of T Canadian Studies Graduate Student Network (CSGSN) at the Canadian Studies program is pleased to announce the next in an ongoing series of CSGSN Graduate Student Workshops. Over the course of 2014, the recipients of our 2014 Graduate Student Research grant have presented on their research and had an opportunity to receive feedback from a sympathetic but critically engaged audience. Please join us on Friday, November 28, for the next in this series of stimulating research presentations and conversations.

The nude in Canadian art has held a contentious position as a site of censorship and debate since the early twentieth century. In 1927 Canadian artist John W. Russell was driven to return to Paris following public outcry over his nude painting in that year’s Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. In 1931, The Art Gallery of Toronto (AGT) refused to hang Bertram Brooker’s painting Figures in Landscape, and two years later Lilias Torrance Newton’s painting, Nude, was removed from a Canadian Group of Painters exhibition at the AGT. In attending to the absence of scholarship on the nude in Canada, this paper investigates why the nude genre failed to assume a pivotal place within the canon of Canadian art history.By painting nudes that were highly self-aware of the interrelationship between artist, viewer, and model, artists disrupted the conventions of the idealized nude woman as a product of the male gaze. The enduring universality of the nude could not be reconciled with the nationalist ideology defended by Canada’s modern landscapists.

Learning how to execute a nude figure study was an essential stage in an artist’s training and Canadian art schools had been offering life-drawing classes since the end of the nineteenth century.The nude garnered moral criticism from the right; yet, according to art institutions, critics, and artists, it remained central to the development of modern art in Canada. How do we explain this paradox?