Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Canadian

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Canada sought to define itself as an independent dominion with allegiance to the British Empire. The visual arts were considered central to the formation of a distinct national identity, and the Group of Seven's landscapes became part of a larger program to unify the nation and assert its uniqueness. National Visions, National Blindness traces the development of this program and illuminates its conflicted history.

Using newly discovered archival evidence, Leslie Dawn revises common interpretations of several well-known events and...

A misunderstood and sometimes maligned figure, Vincent Massey was one of Canada's most influential cultural policy-makers and art patrons. Best known as Canada's first native-born Governor General, he chaired the landmark Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences that led to the creation of the Canada Council. The Force of Culture examines Massey's notion of culture, its conflicted roots in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Canadian Protestant thought, and Massey's transformation into a champion of culture as a bastion of Canadian...

When the video camera first appeared on the market, artists hailed the newly available equipment as the new pencil, the better canvas, the best eye of all. The medium was exciting and revolutionary: low-cost and low-tech; "everybody" was curious as galleries and museums hastened to program new video works in festivals and exhibitions. However, little aesthetic or critical material was available on either artists or issues: it was generally assumed that artists' video was just some kind of wannabe television -- its concerns and achievements, and its relationship to the visual arts...

The Far Shore (1976), made under the direction of celebrated visual artist and experimental filmmaker Joyce Wieland, is one of Canada's most innovative contributions to cinema. The film borrows elements from the life of Canadian painter Tom Thomson, who is represented by the character of Tom McLeod. The main character, however, is not Tom, but the fictional creation of Eulalie de Chicoutimi, the married Qu?b?coise woman who loves him. Using Eulalie's perspective, Wieland was able to re-frame Thomson's life and story as a romantic melodrama while infusing it with subversive...

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) occupies a prominent position in Canada s national culture and has become a celebrated icon for his magnificent landscapes as well as for his brief life and mysterious death. The shy, enigmatic artist and woodsman s innovative painting style produced such seminal Canadian images as The Jack Pine and The West Wind, while his untimely drowning nearly a century ago is still a popular subject of fierce debate.

Originally a commercial artist, Thomson fell in love with the forests and lakes of Ontario s Algonquin Park and devoted himself to rendering...

Twentieth-century art has usually been analysed in terms of intellectual aesthetic principles. But several important artists of this century were motivated less by aesthetic ideas than by spiritual values. Ann Davis considers the work of five of the most dynamic and innovative Canadian painters of the period: Bertram Brooker, Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, Jock Macdonald, and Fred Varley. She shows how these artists strove to work with mystical forms, those involved a transcendent, direct, selfless, unitive experience of God or ultimate reality.

None of these artists was motivated solely by...

First published in 1975, The Cage was a graphic novel before there was a name for the genre. Considered an early masterpiece of the genre, the Canadian cult comic has been out of print for decades. The new edition includes an introduction by Canadian comics master and Lemony Snicket collaborator Seth (Palookaville; It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken).

Cryptic and disturbing, like Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) illustrating a film by Ozu, The Cage spurns narrative for atmosphere, guiding us through a series of disarrayed rooms and desolate landscapes,...