In 1953 eleven Canadian Abstract Expressionist artists banded together to break through the barricades of traditional art at a time when landscapes were about the only paintings collectors were buying. Hungry for recognition, raging against the art establishment that was shutting them out, they decided to form a collective, expecting they would gain more attention as a group than as solo artists. In 1954, The Painters Eleven--Jack Bush, Oscar Cahén, Hortense Gordon, Tom Hodgson, Alexandra Luke, Jock Macdonald, Ray Mead, Kazuo Nakamura, William Ronald, Harold Town and Walter Yarwood--held their first exhibition in Toronto. Initially the public response echoed the worldwide sentiments toward Abstract Expressionism --mockery and bewilderment. Nevertheless, the exhibition attracted wide public interest and criticism faded into acclaim from critics and collectors alike. A successful 1956 exhibition at the Riverside Gallery in New York even elicited praise from the influential critic Clement Greenberg. Packed with gorgeous full color reproductions, this highly detailed account reveals the influences of the indivudual artists on the group's dynamic art and uncovers why the Painters Eleven had such a struggle for recognition, and why they acheived it so masterfully.

From the Roaring Twenties and the Group of Seven to the Automatistes and the early Cold War, Canadian artists lived through and embodied an era of global tumult and change. With an interweaving of historical narrative, lavish illustrations, and writings by many of Canada's most revered cultural figures, Lora Senechal Carney illuminates the lives, perspectives, and works of the era's painters and provides glimpses of the sculptors, poets, dancers, critics, and filmmakers with whom they associated. Canadian Painters in a Modern World gives readers direct access to a carefully curated selection of writings, artworks, photos, and other documents that help to reconstruct the public spheres in which artists including Paul-Émile Borduas, Emily Carr, Alex Colville, Lawren Harris, David Milne, and Pegi Nicol MacLeod circulated. Each of the book’s eight chapters consists of a narrative about a key issue or debate, focusing on the relationship of art to politics and society, and on how these are negotiated in an individual's life. Relating artistic engagement with and responses to the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, Senechal Carney discovers a common desire for new connections between art and life. Revealing continuities, ruptures, and watershed moments, Canadian Painters in a Modern World showcases artistic production within specific socio-political contexts to shed new light on Canadian art during three decades of conflict and crisis.

Joan Murray discusses social and political events in combination with the movements, ideas, attitudes, styles, and important groups in Canadian art of this century.