Glossary of Canadian Art History

A seminal figure in the Vancouver art scene since the 1960s, Falk produces surreal and dreamlike works that reinvent everyday items as objects of wonder. Throughout her multidisciplinary practice in sculptural ceramics, painting, installation, and performance, she returns to subjects such as fruit, shoes, clothing, sidewalks, water, and skies. While distinctly personal, her work has been aligned with Funk, Fluxus, Surrealism, and Pop Art, and is widely recognized in Canada and abroad. (See Gathie Falk: Life & Work by Michelle Jacques)

A painter and illustrator influenced by mid-century American regionalist artists. Trained at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal (now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal), Faucher later taught art for the city’s Catholic school board.

A Montreal painter who participated in the first Automatiste exhibitions in the 1940s, Fauteux became associated with the avant-garde group through the artist Paul-Émile Borduas, whom he met at Montreal’s École du meuble. However, unlike the majority of Automatiste painters, Fauteux never embraced abstraction, nor was he a signatory of the group’s manifesto, Refus global, in 1948.

Employing overtly figurative or abstract styles, Fautrier created etchings, paintings, book illustrations, and sculpture. He is associated with 1950s Art Informel, though the gestural style seen in several of his paintings of the 1920s prefigures this movement by several decades.

The style of the Fauves (French for “wild beasts”), a group of painters who took their name from a derogatory phrase used by the French journalist Louis Vauxcelles. As a historical movement, Fauvism began at the controversial Salon d’Automne in 1905, and ended less than five years later, in early 1910. Fauvism was characterized by bold, unmixed colours, obvious brush strokes, and a subjective approach to representation. Among the most important of the Fauves were Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck.

A major contemporary multidisciplinary artist whose sculpture, drawings, and installations have been exhaustively exhibited and collected for the past five decades. Favro moved from Huntsville to London, Ontario, as a teenager; in the 1960s he was part of a dynamic group of London-based artists that included Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe.

This American, New Deal agency organized and funded employment in the visual arts under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 and was part of the Works Progress Administration (renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939). Artists supported by the Federal Art Project created 200,000 murals, posters, illustrations, and fine artworks, many of lasting importance.

A non-profit, membership-based organization devoted to advancing Canadian art. It was founded in 1941 by artists including André Biéler and Lawren Harris. The Federation of Canadian Artists maintains a members’ gallery on Granville Island, Vancouver.

Founded and incorporated in 1961 by M.F. (Budd) Feheley and now run by his daughter, Pat, Feheley Fine Arts is a Toronto, Ontario, art gallery dedicated to Inuit art. Artists represented by the gallery include major twentieth-century and contemporary figures such as Kenojuak Ashevak, Shuvinai Ashoona, Annie Pootoogook, and Jutai Toonoo.

The director of the Toronto commercial art gallery Feheley Fine Arts, Feheley is an expert in Inuit art. Since taking over from her father, M.F. (Budd) Feheley, who established the gallery in 1961, Feheley has represented important contemporary artists including Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016) and Shuvinai Ashoona (b.1961). She has also written extensively on the subject of Inuit art and served as a consultant for public and corporate Inuit art collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

A prominent figure in German Expressionism, and a member of several artist groups, including Die Brücke, the Novembergruppe, Gruppe 1919, and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He worked in multiple mediums, including painting, watercolour, and woodcut, and worked as a cartoonist for a portion of his career before becoming an instructor at Bauhaus in 1919 and fleeing the Nazi regime to return to New York City in 1937. Feininger was also a trained musician and composer.

An Ottawa artist currently based in Toronto whose multidisciplinary practice explores themes of body, embodiment, identity, and auto-ethnography in a sustained critique of the Colonial paradigm. feldman-kiss holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2011 feldman-kiss participated in the Canadian Forces Artists Program, for which they were embedded with the United Nations Mission in Sudan to shadow Canadian peacekeepers and international UN military observers. feldman-kiss’s work has been exhibited internationally.

Encompassing a wide range of historical and contemporary philosophical and political perspectives, feminism can be broadly understood as the belief that men and women should be socially, politically, and economically equal. In the West, a small number of women writers first began to question women’s inferior social status, particularly in matters of marriage and education, in the Renaissance. By the nineteenth century, prominent feminists in Britain, the United States, and Canada were championing the idea of women’s suffrage. The twentieth century has seen an expansion of feminist thinking to consider how race, class, work, sexuality, and a broader understanding of gender impact how different women experience inequality and shape the social justice goals of feminist movements around the world.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Gerald Ferguson was a Conceptual artist and painter who taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) from 1968 to 2003. Using everyday materials, he produced large-scale and often monochromatic canvases that explore the notion of authorship and the construction of meaning in painting. Ferguson played a key role in establishing NSCAD as a centre for Conceptual art.

A prominent early twentieth-century painter, Fergusson studied in Paris and spent many years there in artistic circles that included Impressionists, Fauves, and Cubists. His work, like that of other artists now known as the Scottish Colourists, displays the bold hues and graphic forms typical of French Post-Impressionist painting.

A painter, sculptor, and stained-glass artist and a member of the Montreal-based Automatistes. Ferron studied at the École des beaux-arts in Montreal (now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal) before meeting Paul-Émile Borduas, whose approach to modern art became crucial to her artistic development. In 1953 she moved to France, where she lived for thirteen years.

A painter, clothing designer, and arts educator, Fife works in an expressionistic mode with subtle colours and brush strokes as metaphors for inner thought. She is the founder of the Fife Collection, a Native American clothing line with international recognition.

A descriptive term for an artwork that depicts or references recognizable objects or beings, including humans. Figurative art is often representational and takes source material from the real world, although its subjects may be overlaid with metaphors and allegory. The term arose in popular usage around the 1950s to describe artwork in contrast with the Abstract Expressionist movement as well as nonfigurative and non-objective art.

A compositional term referring to the perception of an object (the figure), as distinguished from its surround (the ground), especially in a context where this distinction is ambiguous. These two elements are interdependent—one defines the other. They can also be articulated as positive and negative shapes.

An abstract painter whose work is frequently gestural and calligraphic in style. Fink studied at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Art Students League of New York before moving to Paris in the 1950s, where he participated in several solo and group exhibitions.

A New York City-born artist best known for his Expressionistic, realist paintings of everyday suburban life in America. He received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) from 1974 to 1978 before serving as a trustee and senior critic at the New York Academy of Art. In 2006, he was honoured with a membership to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

An abstract artist and arts educator, Fisher became active in the vibrant art scene in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the 1960s and 1970s. During his career, he had both solo and group exhibitions, nationally and internationally. His most important Canadian commission was the mural he painted for the Montreal International Airport at Dorval. His work is held in collections across the country, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Musée des beaux arts du Québec.

An accomplished painter, Fisher received his formal training at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design) under the direction of Frederick Varley. As an official Canadian war artist during the Second World War, Fisher made 246 sketches that he later turned into watercolour and oil paintings. Prior to becoming a war artist, Fisher was known for a series of murals he painted for the British Columbia Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco.

A Winnipeg-born painter and printmaker, FitzGerald was a member of the Group of Seven from 1932 to 1933. He favoured depictions of prairie landscapes and houses, which he executed in pointillist, precisionist, and abstract styles. (See Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald: Life & Work by Michael-Parke Taylor.)

A movement started in Germany in 1962 defined by an attitude of rebellion against artistic conservatism and professionalism rather than a particular style. Street art and festivals figured prominently in Fluxus activities, which were eventually centred in New York City and lasted until the early 1970s. Major influences were the composer John Cage and the artist Marcel Duchamp.

An artist and writer born in London, Ontario. Since 1976 he has lived in Toronto, where he is an active member of the artistic community as a board member, curator, arts writer, and teacher. Fones has explored issues of artistic production, materials, and representation in his photographs, sculptures, watercolours, and installations.

A mixed-media painter influenced by basketry designs, Maidu creation myths, and the trickster figure of the coyote. In 1979 Fonseca began his Coyote series, which depicted the traditional figure as a contemporary persona variously donning a leather jacket, clad in high-top sneakers, or situated in San Francisco’s Mission District or a Parisian café. Fonseca is known for connecting a past Native American identity to the present. In the 1990s his works became more abstract and political, referencing the physical and spiritual genocide of the Indigenous peoples of California.

An innovative abstract sculptor and painter born in Argentina. In Milan in 1947 Fontana founded Spazialismo, a movement that prefigured performance and Land art in its concern for time, space, and dynamism. In the late 1940s he began to slash and puncture his paintings, a novel technique intended to refute the canvas’s flatness. 

After studying in London, New York, Munich, Brittany, and the Netherlands, Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes arrived in Cornwall, in the United Kingdom, in 1885. There she met her husband, fellow painter Stanhope Forbes, with whom she would open the Newlyn School of Painting in 1899. Forbes exhibited and sold her paintings throughout her life, and was a prominent figure in the Cornwall artists’ colonies of the early twentieth century. Her work covers a range of styles and media, including early career etchings, with a particular focus on children.

Enlisting with the Canadian Army at the outbreak of the First World War, Forbes became an official Canadian war artist in 1918. Subsequently known as a portrait and landscape painter and opposed to modern art and, in particular, abstraction, Forbes resigned his memberships in the Ontario Society of Arts and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, in 1953 and 1958 respectively. He then became a founding member of the short-lived Ontario Institute of Painters, an association that focused on realism in painting.

Born in Dublin, Stanhope Forbes was raised in England. Influenced by the French plein air painters, he founded an art school in Newlyn, a Cornish village, with his wife, the Canadian painter Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes, in 1899. Forbes’s work includes genre scenes, landscapes, and interiors.

A reactionary association of painters, founded in Paris in the mid-1930s by art critic and painter Henri Hérault. The group rejected avant-garde movements such as Impressionism and Surrealism, seeking instead to revive principles of craftsmanship in French art by painting scenes of contemporary life in accessible, often realist styles.

A painter, muralist, writer, and jewellery maker, Ford studied at the Central Ontario School of Art in Toronto in 1881, then travelled to England and France to continue her art education at the Royal Academy of Arts and Académie Colarossi. She was a founding member of the Society of Mural Decorators. Ford co-edited the magazine Tarot (1896), which was dedicated to the Arts and Crafts Movement.

The study of art by analyzing a work’s form and style to determine its meaning and quality. It emphasizes colour, texture, composition, and line over narrative, concept, or social and political context. In the 1960s, the American critic Clement Greenberg strongly championed formalism. By the end of the 1960s, postmodernism and conceptual art began to challenge formalism as a system of critique.

In art, the idea of l’informe was introduced by writer George Bataille in 1929 to describe an alternative to humanistic categories of art, one linked to his celebration of the debased. Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois reintroduced the term to critical discussions in 1996 to describe a thread that they saw running through the art of the twentieth century. In Buddhism, the world of formlessness is the world of the spirit, existing above the worlds of form and of desire.

A Nova Scotian artist known for his 1:1 scale sculptures in bronze, wood, and steel. In his Anything Less Is a Compromise, 2004, the famous Stanley Cup hockey trophy sits atop a washing machine, evoking the pedestal-artifact formation standard in sculpture; his Drum Kit, 2002, presents The Who drummer Keith Moon’s 1964 instrument scattered across the floor. These bronzes are in the collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.

A painter associated with Atlantic Realism whose carefully crafted, compelling pictures draw from a wide range of real and imagined sources. Mentored by Alex Colville at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, in the 1950s, Forrestall paints in egg tempera, a technique introduced to him by Colville and Forrestall’s classmate Christopher Pratt.

An artist, dancer, and choreographer who was an important figure in the development of experimental dance and Minimalism in the 1960s. Born in Italy, Forti moved to New York in the early 1960s, where she invented a style of dance based on improvisation and natural movements. In 1960, she introduced her Dance Constructions, in which dancers’ bodies together form a dance that may also be interpreted as sculpture.

A Quebecois painter, watercolourist, and printmaker based in Montreal during most of his career. He is best known for his detailed, quaint depictions of the St. Lawrence Valley and its surrounding landscapes. Fortin had a particular interest in capturing the rural villages and lifestyles of Quebec’s countryside and was highly influenced by the work of French painter Jean-François Millet (1814–1875).

An Ottawa-based artist, educator, and administrator best known for his realistic prints and painted portraits. In the 1890s Fosbery studied under Canadian artist Franklin Brownell and then briefly in Paris. He was wounded while serving in the First World War and was instrumental in helping to establish Canadian war art programs. Fosbery was president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) from 1943 to 1946.

A found object can be any object—natural or fabricated, whole or fragmentary—taken up by an artist and integrated into an artwork. Artists working with found objects may focus on particular types or styles, personal or cultural meaning, or formal elements in choosing what to include in their work. An example is Picasso’s Bull’s Head, 1942, made of a bicycle seat and handlebars. 

The concept of a higher spatial dimension beyond our immediate perception influenced major movements in early twentieth-century modern art, including Cubism, Futurism, and Suprematism. In Cubism, the fourth dimension is visualized through the simultaneous representation of three-dimensional objects from different viewpoints. Kazimir Malevich, the founder of Suprematism, articulated this higher dimension by painting geometric planes moving through infinite space.

Initially known as a photographer, Frampton is now largely remembered for his theoretical writings and experimental, non-narrative films. He was also an influential teacher of film, film history, photography, and design, holding posts at various institutions in the New York area during the last twenty-five years of his life.

Joseph-Charles Franchère was a painter, illustrator, and decorator of Quebec churches who was trained in the academic tradition in Paris. Inspired by Symbolism, his work often presents an idealized image of pastoral life. He illustrated, among other works, The Riots (1916) of Father Lionel Groulx. His works were chosen to represent Canada at the World’s Fairs in Chicago (1893), Buffalo (1901), and St. Louis (1904).

Associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, Francis was a painter and printmaker. He studied art at the University of California, Berkley, before moving to Paris in 1950, where he met and was influenced by the Quebec artist Jean Paul Riopelle. Francis returned to California in 1962. His paintings relied on a rich, evocative use of colour, moving from centrally placed shapes through an emphasis on white space to fluid forms and drips as his career progressed. As a printmaker and publisher, Francis ran a lithography studio and Lapis Press, dedicated to artists’ books. He helped establish a California style of modernist painting and was involved in the organization of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, in 1980.

Born in the Netherlands, Franck immigrated to Canada following the First World War. He is known for his watercolours and oil paintings of Toronto streets and houses. Franck was an important influence on Painters Eleven.

A Swiss American documentary photographer and filmmaker who worked as a photojournalist for American magazines such as Life and Vogue. He is best known for his photographic book The Americans, which was published in 1958 to controversy, as it presented candid, unvarnished images of post-war American society taken by Frank during his travels across the country and addressed issues such as race and class divisions. From the 1970s, Frank divided his time between New York and Mabou, Nova Scotia.

A New York School artist who developed specific techniques to create atmospheric effects in her paintings, including blotting and staining unprepared canvas with thin pigments. Frankenthaler also experimented with woodcuts, colour printing, and sculpture.

The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research was founded in Germany in 1923 and is considered the first Western institution devoted to concepts of social democracy derived from the theories of philosopher Karl Marx and sociologist Max Weber. Theorists associated with the school, such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, analyzed social and economic systems through a Marxist lens. This approach became known more broadly as “critical theory.”

A Wisconsin-born artist, curator, and educator known for her expressive, highly detailed style of painting and drawing, with a focus on portraits and landscapes. She earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota before moving to Halifax, where she taught drawing at the Technical University of Nova Scotia and served as the Acting Director of the Dalhousie Art Gallery. She was inducted to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1976.

A painter, photographer, illustrator, and art teacher born in England. Upon immigrating to Canada around 1860, Fraser began painting studio backdrops for the photographer William Notman, becoming a partner in Notman’s Toronto firm in 1867.

Daniel (Danny) Freedman was an actor who lived at 78 Gerrard Street West with AA Bronson, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and Mimi Paige. He was a judge of The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, 1971, a performance held at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Eric Freifeld was a Russian-born figurative painter and influential instructor at the Ontario College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design University), where he taught drawing and served as chair of the fine arts department. He initially gained recognition in Edmonton, where he had moved with his mother and sister at the age of five. Freifeld’s interests and output were broad, but he is perhaps best known for a series of structural, minutely detailed watercolours that placed him among the leading Canadian artists of his generation. A 1986 retrospective exhibition at the Rodman Hall Art Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto was organized following his death in 1984.

A mid-twentieth-century cultural movement that manifested in literature, film, and philosophy, French existentialism is popularly associated with the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Its main ideas are that human existence is essentially inexplicable and meaningless and that human beings are free and independent actors.

The foremost American monumental sculptor of the early twentieth century, French is best known for designing the statue of Abraham Lincoln, 1920, in the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC. He first gained acclaim for The Minute Man, 1871–75, a commemorative monument in the Beaux-arts aesthetic commissioned by the town of Concord, Massachusetts. Over the course of his sixty-year career, French created allegorical and historical figures and portrait statues in a style that infused Neoclassism with naturalism.

A mostly figurative painter and photographer, and an important member of the Depression-era gay artistic community. He was a member of the PaJaMa photographic collective along with his wife, Margaret Hoening, and his lover Paul Cadmus. He was deeply interested in Carl Jung’s psychoanalytical theories and suggested that his paintings be viewed in light of Jung’s writings.

A Franciscan friar, painter, and architect, and the best-known of the artists of his religious order who travelled to New France. Luc arrived in New France in 1670, and planned the new chapel of the Récollets as well as made several church paintings.

An ancient painting technique that is often used to create wall murals. After a section of a wall is covered in wet plaster, paint is applied. As it dries, the paint absorbs into the plaster and becomes a permanent part of the wall. This technique was notably used in the Italian Renaissance by masters such as Giotto and Michelangelo.

A figurative painter equally influenced by Surrealism, New Objectivity, and Ingres’s variety of French classicism, Freud nonetheless remained apart from any contemporary art movement. A grandson of Sigmund Freud, he produced an intensely personal body of work, with his models selected from his own family and immediate circle. Similarities can be drawn between his work and that of painter Francis Bacon.

A painter, illustrator, and graphic designer, Frey painted portraits and landscapes influenced by Symbolism. He was a member of the Dresden Art Cooperative and taught at the Dresden Academy of Arts and Crafts.

A prominent modernist art and literary critic, art historian, and poet, Fried was a formalist who differentiated between the artwork itself, the experience of viewing the artwork, and the socio-political context in which it was made. His 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” is a well-known piece of art criticism examining Minimalist art. He later abandoned art criticism to write about the history of early modernism. He teaches in the Humanities Department at Johns Hopkins University.

A New York City art gallery owner, Rose Fried took over the Pinacoteca Gallery in the 1940s, changing its name to Rose Fried Gallery in 1944. An advocate for abstract art, she introduced the work of European abstractionists including Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky to an American public. Fried also represented Cubist, Futurist, and Latin American modernist artists.

One of the major Romantic painters, and the most exemplary of the movement’s German practitioners. Friedrich’s dramatic landscapes—seascapes and mountains, forests and farmland—are both realistic and symbolic, painted in meticulous detail but expressive of the artist’s deeply held mystical and spiritual beliefs.

Architectural term for the entablature between the architrave and cornice of a building. Also employed as an ornamental border on furniture and walls. In painting the term may denote a pictorial element consisting of a horizontal line of figures or objects.

A militant organization supporting Quebec sovereignty that was formed in 1963 by Raymond Villeneuve, Gabriel Hudon, and Georges Schoeters. The Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) emerged in response to major political and cultural shifts taking place in Quebec, as well as other revolutionary movements against foreign imperialism occurring around the world, notably in Algeria. The FLQ disbanded in 1971 following the arrest of multiple members linked to the October Crisis.

The art critic who coined the term “Post-Impressionism” to describe the work of the Parisian avant-garde painters of the early twentieth century, Fry was a British painter, writer, and member of the influential Bloomsbury group. Beginning his career specializing in the Old Masters, in 1906 he was appointed to the position of curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. After his return to England in 1910, his work on developing the formalist theory of art criticism, as well as promoting Post-Impressionism, had a major influence on the artistic tastes of the Anglophone world.

A literary critic and professor of English. Fry’s ideas about literature’s symbolic underpinnings influenced a generation of critics and writers include Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood. His focus on myth and archetypes as the basis of a literary universe of the imagination was best articulated in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). 

An architect, systems theorist, and engineer, Richard Buckminster Fuller began his career working on technologies for modular housing but went on to develop futurist, utopian design propositions that attempted to address global issues of energy and industrialization. His experiments in geometry led to his invention of the geodesic dome, a form of construction the strength of which increases logarithmically in relation to its size and an icon of 1960s design both mainstream (the U.S. pavilion at Expo 67) and countercultural (Drop City, a southern Colorado artists’ community formed in 1965).

An American art movement originating in California in the 1960s in response to the high-mindedness of Abstract Expressionism. Funk art’s figurative works may appear crude and irreverent. The movement combined unusual techniques and materials—significantly ceramics—often incorporating found objects from consumer culture into its cartoonish aesthetic. The name “Funk” was derived from “Funky,” a jazz music term which indicates the unconventional.

An experimental film collective and theatre located in Toronto from 1977 to 1989, dedicated to the production, distribution, and exhibition of 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm films. Many of its members were connected to the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), among them Funnel co-founder Ross McLaren.

A graphic artist, Furnival served as art director of Chatelaine magazine in 1952–53. During his tenure at the magazine, he frequently commissioned illustrator Oscar Cahén and is seen to have been an early supporter of Cahén’s career.

A New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer whose videos and performances address the politics of gender, race, and systems of power. Informed by postcolonial, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory, Fusco explores concepts of cultural otherness with a recent focus on Cuba. The recipient of several prestigious awards for her art and her writing, she is also a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.

Founded in 1909, this Italian movement in modern art and literature embraced elements of Cubism and Neo-Impressionism. The Futurist aesthetic idealized technological advances, war, dynamism, and the energy of modern life. Among the most renowned Futurist artists are Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo.