Glossary of Canadian Art History

Iacovleff was a friend and contemporary of Vasili Shukhaev, the one-time teacher of Paraskeva Clark. Both artists moved to Paris in 1920, where they showed in various exhibitions of Russian art. From 1934 to 1937, Iacovleff was director of the painting department of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and corresponded with Paraskeva Clark in 1936.

A celebrated painter and art teacher, and a passionate defender of academic art over the course of his seventy-year career.  An artistically gifted child, he entered Montreal’s École des beaux-arts (now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal) at age fourteen. His landscapes, city views, and portraits show his interest in texture and wonderful abilities with light effects.

Part of the Alberta University of the Arts (previously Alberta College of Art and Design), the Illingworth Kerr Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in Calgary, Alberta. Opened in 1958, the gallery has hosted exhibitions of art, craft, and design, with a current focus on contemporary visual culture, research, and university and public programming.

An artists’ correspondence network founded in 1969 in the tradition of the New York Correspondence School by Vancouver conceptual artists Michael Morris, Gary Lee-Nova, and Vincent Trasov, who took the respective names Marcel Dot (later, Marcel Idea), Artimus Rat, and Myra Peanut. Participants exchanged ideas, information, and materials through the post in a spirit of collaboration, with Morris and Trasov keeping track of addresses and image requests.

Colourful engraved cards made originally by a French publisher who established a printing company in 1796 and named it after Épinal, his birthplace. New techniques of mechanical printing allowed the images to be cheaply made, and they reached a wide public. The cards depicted simple, cheerful moral fables or jokes and riddles for children, and the name became a byword for conventionally optimistic sayings or empty clichés.

Rooted in the ideas of the early twentieth-century English philosopher and poet T.E. Hulme and related to French Symbolism, Imagism is a movement in American poetry that rejected Victorian and Romantic aesthetics in favour of simplicity, clarity, and the use of precise imagery. Ezra Pound formalized the definition of the Imagist poem in 1912 alongside fellow poets Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, and F.S. Flint; the first anthology also included work by James Joyce and William Carlos Williams, among others. It was absorbed into a more general modernist movement around 1917.

Paint applied so thickly that it stands out in relief and retains the marks of the brush or palette knife.

A highly influential art movement that originated in France in the 1860s, Impressionism is associated with the emergence of modern urban European society. Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and other Impressionists rejected the subjects and formal rigours of academic art in favour of scenes of nature and daily life and the careful rendering of atmospheric effects. They often painted outdoors.

Originating from American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, indexicality in photography refers to photography’s special status as an index—that is, a sign that has a direct, physical relationship to that which it represents, like a thumbprint. It is not a likeness or a symbol. A photograph could not exist without its referent (what it depicts). In the 1970s and 1980s, Rosalind Krauss and Roland Barthes, among others, published foundational texts on photography’s indexical nature.

A colloquial name that refers to the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., coined in the early 1970s by the Winnipeg Free Press and subsequently adopted more widely. Members included Jackson Beardy, Eddy Cobiness, Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig, Carl Ray, and Joseph Sanchez.

Principally known as a Pop artist (and for his famous LOVE design, featuring the word in uppercase with a slanted letter “O”), Indiana was equally important to the development of hard-edge painting and assemblage art. He has often made text a central part of his paintings, screen prints, and sculptures.

With offices in Toronto, the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones (ICCA, formerly the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective) is a non-profit organization that builds connections among and creates opportunities for Indigenous curators, artists, and institutions. The ICCA was founded in 2006 by Cathy Mattes, Barry Ace, Ryan Rice, Ron Noganosh, and Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw. The organization’s mandate is to activate and ensure a future for Indigenous creative sovereignty.

A master of Neoclassicism who learned from one of the greatest artists of his age, Jacques-Louis David. In history paintings, portraits, and Orientalist fantasies (such as his iconic Grande Odalisque, 1814) Ingres’s brushwork is all but invisible and his emphasis on clean lines predominates. He is often contrasted with the exemplary Romanticist Eugène Delacroix.

A largely self-taught landscape painter whose influences included both the Hudson River School and Barbizon painting. Inness’s aesthetics and philosophy were heavily indebted to the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, with whom he shared a belief in the close connection between the natural and spiritual worlds. He was widely recognized during his lifetime as a major figure in American art: someone whose landscapes excelled in evoking atmosphere, emotion, and spiritual suggestiveness.

Mixed-media constructed environments that are often temporary and site-specific. The term originated in the 1970s and marked a shift from the aesthetic, isolated art object to considering its context in everyday life as the source of meaning. Installation art is not merely to be looked at but to be felt as a presence in space by the viewer.

Associated with the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is a contemporary art gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1963 by Holmes Perkins, then the dean of architecture at the university, as a non-collecting institution modeled on the European Kunsthalle. The Institute remains dedicated to the work of overlooked and under-represented artists, making it the site of major early exhibitions of artists including Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Damián Ortega, and Cy Twombly.

A short-lived non-profit organization established in 1967 to encourage Vancouver’s budding art scene and artistic community. Intermedia, which initially went by the name Intermedia Society, hosted exhibitions, workshops, seminars, and gatherings with the support of federal arts agencies. It became an important meeting place for artists and a site of creative exchange, spawning various West Coast artistic and literary movements before ceasing operations in 1972.

A world’s fair, also called the Great London Exposition, intended to display the latest developments in technology, industry, and the arts from thirty-six countries. Its buildings covered twenty-one acres in South Kensington, where the Natural History Museum and Science Museum now stand.

Emerging around 1920 and reaching its height by the mid-twentieth century, International Modern architecture embraced an unadorned aesthetic of rectilinear structures, with flat surfaces and large planes of glass held in steel frames. Among the most prominent International Modern architects are Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, and Philip Johnson.

A professional artists’ union that existed from 1898 to 1925, dedicated to exhibiting and promoting what it termed “the finest art of the day.” The union became known as simply The International, with James McNeill Whistler serving as its first president, followed first by French sculptor Auguste Rodin and then by Irish painter William Orpen. The majority of The International’s public and private exhibitions were held in London, England, with the first American exhibition held in 1904 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Membership was by invitation only.

A slick, market-savvy Conceptual art gallery that opened in New York’s East Village in 1983, when most other galleries in the area were showing Neo-Expressionist works in distinctly bohemian spaces. Among the artists to show there were Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Meyer Vaisman (a co-founder of the gallery, with Elizabeth Koury).

Published by the Inuit Art Foundation since 1986, Inuit Art Quarterly is a source of news and criticism related to Inuit art and artists. The magazine publishes both scholarly and popular articles and declares itself to be “dedicated to the advancement and appreciation of Inuit and circumpolar Indigenous arts.”

Inuit Art Section was a division within the former federal department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC). Over time, the division acquired approximately 5,000 items for the purpose of promoting Inuit art nationally and internationally. It circulated these in travelling exhibitions until 1987, after which the collection was dispersed to cultural institutions across Canada.

The ICI was established in 1974 and based in Arviat (formerly called Eskimo Point). It conducted a variety of research projects for the preservation and maintenance of Inuit cultural identity, as well as provided organizational and hosting services to other agencies. When it disbanded in 2000, the Nunavut government assumed ownership of its collection of 1,600 carvings, prints, and pieces of jewellery.

This former gallery in Mannheim, Germany, was dedicated to exhibiting and selling artwork created by Inuit artists. It staged Oviloo Tunnillie’s first two international solo exhibitions.

A term used to describe Inuit principles, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ) encompasses Inuit experience, values, beliefs, and knowledge about the world, with the past informing the present and future in a non-linear way. It brings together social, cultural, ecological, and cosmological knowledge. IQ played an integral role in establishing Nunavut’s government.

Born Eugen Ionescu, Eugène Ionesco was a playwright whose first one-act play, La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) (1949), is credited as the first example of what would become the Theatre of the Absurd. Modelling exchanges between characters on the repetitive questions and answers of the textbook he was using to learn English, Ionesco created a series of interactions of escalating absurdity in which the conventions of modern life are revealed to be alienating, illogical constructs. His later work built on these themes of futility and the estrangement and fragmentation of the self. Ionesco was inducted into the Académie française in 1970.

A carver who grew up on the land, in the 1960s Osuitok Ipeelee helped start the printmaking program at what is now Kinngait Studios. Also known as Oshaweetok “B”, he is best known for his delicate carvings of inua (caribou spirits) with long, thin legs that demonstrate his deep knowledge of his materials. Other works feature both wildlife and scenes of camp life. With Peter Pitseolak he directed the team of carvers who created the Northwest Territories Council mace in 1955.

A painter, Edith Isaac-Rose was born Edith Ganansky-Teitelbaum and took her parents’ first names as her professional surname. Trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, she was originally an Abstract Expressionist but began producing political, figurative work based on newspaper images in the 1980s. In addition to paintings, she produced drawings and embroideries.

A Toronto art gallery opened in 1955 by Avrom Isaacs. Originally called the Greenwich Gallery, it supported emerging Canadian artists—including Michael Snow, Graham Coughtry, Joyce Wieland, and Robert Markle—and hosted poetry readings, experimental music performances, and film screenings.

A Toronto-based Polish émigré artist and Holocaust survivor who became internationally renowned for his vibrant abstract paintings, Iskowitz was imprisoned at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the Second World War. His early figurative works document the horrors he witnessed in the concentration camps. In the late 1960s, inspired by the Canadian landscape, Iskowitz developed the distinctive style of abstract painting for which he is best known. (See Gershon Iskowitz: Life & Work by Ihor Holubizky.)

A leading painter and etcher from the Hague School of Dutch Realist artists, Israëls studied the rigid academic style under Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche in Paris, but he turned to scenes of everyday life rather than historical subjects. He favoured Dutch rural workers and peasants, depicting them indoors and outdoors, working or at leisure, with attention to atmospheric light. In 1895, Israëls served on the committee to organize the first Venice Biennale.

The painters of the pre- and early Italian Renaissance, who worked from roughly the mid-thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century. This was a transformative period in Italian art, when it moved from a Greek- or Byzantine-inflected style to that which we associate today with the Renaissance.