Bertram Brooker, Abstract Pyramids, 1930, oil on canvas, Purchase, Consolidated Fund, 1976 (19-003).
Exhibitions
It’s Alive! Bertram Brooker and Vitalism
Historical Feature and R. Fraser Elliott Galleries
7 November 2009 - 7 March 2010
It’s Alive! Bertram Brooker and Vitalism explores Canadian artist Bertram Brooker’s search for a visual language capable of animating audiences by appealing directly to their physical desires. Representations of Brooker (1888-1955) as the "pioneer" of Canadian abstraction have tended to separate his remarkable career in advertising from his artistic production. It’s Alive! proposes an alternative reading of the artist’s work, one that locates Brooker’s interdisciplinary practice at the intersection of developments in biology, communications and visual art in the first half of the 20th century.
Inspired by early commercial film, international vitalist modernism, and philosopher Henri Bergson’s notion that the individual is a "locus of action," Brooker developed a methodology for "enlivening" an image by simulating energy, movement, and growth. It’s Alive! uncovers affinities between Brooker and a group of international contemporaries who likewise straddled the traditional divide between fine art and mass media, including Adolfo Best- Maugard (1891-1964), Fortunato Depero (1892-1960), Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), Paul Nash (1889-1946) and Graham Sutherland (1903-1980). Featured in the exhibition will be the newly-unearthed The Adventure of the Thumb Print (1912), a film based on a scenario by Brooker, who worked for the Brooklyn-based Vitagraph Company of America in 1912-1913. Brooker’s paintings, drawings and graphic designs reveal the formative influence of this contact with the largest American movie studio in its day through their deployment of cinematic cues that address a mobile spectator.
A major re-evaluation of Brooker‘s oeuvre, It’s Alive! challenges conventional representations of the mid-20th century Toronto art scene as a cloistered community of mystics, proposing an alternative vision of the city as a global marketplace of ideas that incubated the utopian communications theories of Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).
Adam Lauder, Guest Curator
It’s Alive! Bertram Brooker and Vitalism is organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Windsor. The exhibition is presented at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre with the generous support of the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund.
Join Alicia Boutilier, Curator of Canadian Historical Art, for an Art Matters talk in the exhibition on Thursday 12 November at 12.15 pm