Leonard Hutchinson
Got Anything to Eat Mister?, 1930, woodcut
on paper, 5/50. Purchase, Consolidated Fund, 1975 (18-016)
Exhibitions
Of Human Concern
Frances K. Smith Gallery
5 January - 4 April
This exhibition features Realist prints and drawings of the late 1920s to the 1950s, from the Art Centre’s extensive collection of works on paper. The Interwar period saw a return to, or reemphasis of, figuration and social observation by many North American artists, in response to social and political events such as the rise of Communism, Great Depression and Spanish Civil War. Compelled to question their role in society, these artists turned their compassionate and chronicling eye toward humans in contemporary rural or urban existence.
Realism is a wide-ranging term that encompasses several artistic movements within these decades-Regionalism, Social Realism, and Urban Realism-which can elide into each other. For the most part celebratory and revivalist, Regionalism sought to authenticate a traditional agrarian lifestyle through a modern aesthetic idiom. Regionalism sometimes shared with Social Realism a concern for human suffering; however, the latter was a more declamatory movement, intending to expose political injustice, through direct, heroic scenes, and often with biting satire. Less politically engaged by contrast, Urban Realism involved scrutiny of and fascination with contemporary life, in all its busy-ness and quiet moments. Realism persisted into the 1950s in stubborn contradistinction to other modern art movements on the rise in North America, such as abstraction.
Of Human Concern features works by such artists as Sybil Andrews, Peggy Bacon, Aba Bayefsky, André Biéler, Julius Griffith, Leonard Hutchinson, Jack Nichols, Margaret Dorothy Shelton, Dorothy Stevens and Frederick B. Taylor.
Alicia Boutilier