Glossary of Canadian Art History

A Montreal artist who worked across a variety of media, including film, photography, collage, and box constructions, as well as painting. From 1956 to 1960 Gagnon studied in New York, immersing himself in the city’s avant-garde world of experimental art. Once he was back in Montreal his painting, especially his use of hard edges, was often associated with that of his Plasticien contemporaries.

Although he travelled and lived in Europe periodically throughout his career, Clarence Gagnon is best known for his paintings of the people and landscapes of his native Quebec, and particularly the Charlevoix region. A virtuosic colourist, Gagnon created highly original winter scenes in vivid hues, with generous play between light and dark. He is also known for illustrating books such as Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon (1913) and Le grand silence blanc by L.F. Rouquette (1928).

A writer, scholar, and professor recognized as one of Canada’s most prominent art historians. Born in Paris, Gagnon was based in Montreal and dedicated his career to the advancement and promotion of Quebec and Canadian art and art history. He taught at the Université de Montréal before later founding the Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University.

An art critic and teacher at Montreal’s École du meuble, Gagnon studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. His book Peinture moderne (1940) analyzes various schools of modern art, including religious art. He was a friend to luminaries of the French and Québecois avant-garde, including Fernand Léger and Paul-Émile Borduas.

Gagnon is a mixed-media artist who works primarily with carved plywood to create sculptural bas-reliefs layered with drawing, painting, and engraving techniques. She studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design (now OCAD University) and at Concordia University. Her works evoke the tension between natural and artificial states and are often reminiscent of aerial or topographical views of the landscape.

A leading British portrait painter of the second half of the eighteenth century, Gainsborough was known for the feathery quality of his brushwork. He had a well-known rivalry with the portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1768, Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

An artist-run centre in Ottawa, Ontario, Galerie SAW Gallery was founded in 1973 by a group of Ottawa artists. Since 1989 it has been located in the Arts Court building in Ottawa’s ByWard Market neighbourhood, alongside SAW Video, with which it was once affiliated. SAW exhibits the work of emerging and established Canadian and international artists, with a focus on cultural diversity and politically engaged art.

An important part of the emergent Toronto art scene in the city’s Yorkville neighbourhood in the 1960s, Gallery Moos was founded in 1959 by Walter Moos, who remained its owner and director until his death in 2013. The gallery’s early exhibitions brought a mix of Canadian, American, and European artists to local audiences, with a focus on modernist work. It launched and sustained the careers of a generation of Toronto artists, including Sorel Etrog and Gershon Iskowitz. From 1982 to 1992 Gallery Moos operated an outpost in New York City, New York, expanding its reach into the American art scene. The gallery moved to what would be its final space, in Toronto’s Queen West Arts District, in 1992.

A realist painter and sculptor known for his painstaking process; a single small canvas can take him years to complete. His work is held by major art institutions around the world and was the subject of a retrospective exhibition in 2008 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Based on English town planner Ebenezer Howard’s model of the garden city, the garden city movement promoted the integration of natural and rural environments into town and city planning. Howard first described his model in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), in which he described a planned residential community surrounded by a broad greenbelt of agricultural and park space as an antidote to urban congestion. North American proponents included the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.; in England and Europe, it was associated with members of the Arts and Crafts movement including the architect Richard Barry Parker. Later planners adapted Howard’s principles to both large and small communities.

A painter of luminous Quebec landscapes and a writer credited with modernizing poetry in French Canada. As a student at Montreal’s École des beaux-arts (now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal) he was a friend of Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean Paul Lemieux, and other painters who would go on to define Quebec modernism. His own studies were cut short by his fragile health.

An internationally recognized abstract painter and printmaker, associated with the Plasticiens. Gaucher’s inquisitive nature made him an individualistic figure and artist who drew from many sources, including jazz and atonal music, Georges Braque, Mark Rothko, and the New York Abstractionists. He fought to modernize printmaking and open the medium up to experimental and innovative techniques. Gaucher founded the Associations des peintures-gravures de Montréal in 1960 and was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1981. (See Yves Gaucher: Life & Work by Roald Nasgaard.)

A member—with Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne—of the group of painters now considered the Post-Impressionists, Gauguin is known for his use of colour and symbolism and for his daring compositions. The paintings he made in Tahiti, representing an idealized “primitive” culture, are among his most famous.

A playwright, poet, and polemicist known for contributing greatly to modernist theatre in Quebec, Gauvreau was a leader of the Automatistes and signatory of the 1948 manifesto Refus global. His writing is characterized by poetic abstraction and expression, such as his first play, Bien-être, written in 1947 for his muse and lover, Muriel Guilbault.

An important figure in the history of Canadian decorative arts and design, Gauvreau helped transform Montreal’s École technique into the École du meuble. The school became a centre for Quebec’s avant-garde, drawing artists like Paul-Émile Borduas and others associated with the 1948 Refus global manifesto.

An abstract painter, writer, and film and television producer born and based in Montreal. He was best known as a member of Les Automatistes, a group of Quebecois artists who opposed the formality and restrictions of academic and figurative art, advocating for more fluid, unconscious techniques in painting and drawing. His paintings are characterized by striking brushstrokes and bright, melded colours.

American-born artist who in 1924 began an appointment at the Winnipeg School of Art, where he served as principal for five years.  Gebhardt painted local scenes of piano bars and Winnipeg neighbourhoods, often sketching with Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. Like FitzGerald, he designed sets for the Community Players of Winnipeg amateur theatre group. He later turned to creating museum dioramas, models, and exhibits, and moved back to the United States in 1932 to work at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

The dominant process used to create black and white images for more than a century. Gelatin prints, in which light-sensitive silver salts are bound by a gelatin solution, began to replace albumen prints in the 1890s. Their stability and ease of manufacture contributed to their success, and the characteristic smooth image surface was valued by both amateur and professional photographers.

A multimedia artist influenced early in his artistic development by the London Regionalist artists, whose work surrounded him in his adopted hometown. Geleynse worked in printmaking, painting, and photography before coming to concentrate on 3-D model making, film, and video, which he frequently integrates into large-scale installations.

A prolific, provocative, and socially critical artist collective comprising of AA Bronson (Michael Tims, b.1946), Felix Partz (Ronald Gabe, 1945–1994), and Jorge Zontal (Slobodan Saia-Levy, 1944–1994). General Idea formed in Toronto out of the countercultural scenes of the experimental free school Rochdale College and Theatre Passe Muraille. Their conceptual projects included those associated with Miss General Idea and series dealing with the AIDS crisis. The collective founded FILE in 1972 and the artist-run centre Art Metropole in 1973. (See General Idea: Life & Work  by Sarah E.K. Smith.)

This term refers to paintings that depict scenes of everyday life. Genre paintings were first popularized in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, and typical subject matter includes domestic chores, rural life, and socializing.

The only female follower of Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi was a Baroque painter. She is especially known for her religious scenes and depictions of female figures of the Old Testament, including Bathsheba and Judith. Gentileschi was the first woman to be inducted into the Florentine Academy of the Arts of Drawing (now the Academy of Fine Arts) and was a prominent artist during her lifetime, benefiting from the patronage of the Medici duke Cosimo II. However, after her death she fell into obscurity, and it is only recently that scholars have begun to address the importance of her work.

Based on the concept of geometry as an overt or underlying principle in art or design, geometricism involves an exploration of the way geometric forms and relationships can be used to create an illusion of dimensionality on a surface. This objective may involve the creation of optical illusions or, as employed by the Cubists, the reduction of forms to geometric elements that emphasize their relationship in space.

An academic painter and favourite pupil of Jacques-Louis David, Gérard found success at the 1796 Paris Salon with his picture of Jean-Baptiste Isabey and his daughter; he subsequently became the most sought-after society portraitist in France.

Géricault was a French Romantic painter best known for The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19, a monumental painting depicting the aftermath of a notorious contemporary shipwreck. His lifestyle—he was a noted dandy and adventurous equestrian—and his subject matter—he favoured scenes of high drama, psychological pain, and equine athleticism—exemplified the Romantic artistic personality. Géricault’s work had an enduring influence despite his short life and career and the initial public discomfort with his work’s intensity. Though largely self-taught, he shared a teacher with Eugène Delacroix, the most renowned of French Romantic painters, and his style had a formative effect on the latter’s work.

A student of Fernand Léger’s at the Académie Moderne in Paris in 1931 and of Wassily Kandinsky’s at the Bauhaus in 1932, Germain was an abstract painter. He was a member of the Lyrical Abstraction group in Paris, which for a time included the Quebec artist Jean Paul Riopelle. Germain’s paintings feature dynamic, rectangular applications of paint, often shades of white, with bursts of vibrant colour.

A modernist movement in painting, sculpture, theatre, literature, and cinema. Expressionism’s birth is often traced to 1905, when Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of Dresden painters, broke with the practices and institutions of the academy and bourgeois culture, declaring themselves a “bridge” to the future. Another bold new group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), formed in 1911, focused more on the spiritual in art. Significant Expressionist painters include Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and Egon Schiele.

A physician, naturalist, and polymath, and a compiler of one of Renaissance Zurich’s most important libraries. Gessner was a professor of natural history and ethics at the Reformed-Protestant theological college in Zurich. Among his most important scientific texts is the Historiae Animalium (1551–58, 1587), a richly illustrated five-volume study of the animal kingdom.

A process of painting based on intuitive movement and direct transmission of the artist’s state of mind through the brush stroke. In gestural painting, the paint can also be applied freely through a number of different acts, including pouring, dripping, and splattering. Gestural painting is associated with the Abstract Expressionists and action painting.

An Ottawa-based artist who explored the intersections of art, science, and technology in his multidisciplinary and conceptual practice. Born in the Netherlands, Geuer immigrated to Bolivia with his family before the Second World War and then to Canada in 1954. He spent much of his professional career as a draftsman at the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa. His collaborations with scientists at the observatory greatly influenced his acclaimed and pioneering new media work.

Primarily known as a sculptor, Alberto Giacometti was also a painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Although his early, abstract work was Surrealist with Cubist influences, Giacometti turned to sculpting the figure after the Second World War as well as to phenomenology—a way of understanding the world through perception and experience—increasing the size of his sculptures and thinning the human bodies they depicted until they seemed to almost disappear in space. Frail and isolated, they were written about by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and caught the attention of Samuel Beckett, for whom Giacometti designed the first set for his play Waiting for Godot.

A painter and ceramicist who studied in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Germany, and with painter Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris; he lived in the French capital for twenty-five years and earned the admiration of Gertrude Stein. The influence of Paul Cézanne is immediately evident in works such as Dartmoor Farm, 1931, and Still Life, 1932.

An oilman and collector from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who assembled the largest extant collection of art, rare documents, and artifacts related to the American West. The collection is now held in the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma, which he founded in 1949. 

A regional and renaissance artist in the Maritimes best remembered for her minutely detailed watercolours of flowers and sculptural works. An artist, teacher, and writer, Gillett graduated from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, and the Royal College of Art, London. During her tenure as the first Director of Fine and Applied Arts at Saint John Vocation School, she was instrumental in forming The Maritime Art Association and writing the curriculum for teaching art in elementary schools for the New Brunswick Department of Education. Gillett was a major force in founding the art magazine Maritime Art (later Canadian Art).

A British artist best known as a co-founder of the Camden Town Group, a group of Post-Impressionist painters who were deeply inspired by the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and favoured experimental portraiture as well as scenes of urban life. He studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and later taught at the Westminster School of Art in London.

Founder of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto, Gilson was a philosopher and specialist in French medieval thought. Although he initially focused on René Descartes, Gilson became deeply engaged with the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, which shaped his philosophical outlook from the 1920s until the end of his life. Elected to the Académie française in 1946, Gilson was known for his writing as much as for his scholarship.

An acknowledged master of the early Italian Renaissance who was equally celebrated in his own day: critics including Dante praised the naturalism of his pictures and considered him to have revived painting after a centuries-long slump. Among his most spectacular achievements is the fresco cycle decorating the walls of the Arena Chapel, Padua.

Girling’s roughly rendered representational paintings and drawings—on canvas, paper, vinyl, cotton, and other materials—treat a range of subjects in both imaginary and more realist modes. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

An artist and teacher of studio art at the University of Western Ontario, London. Glabush’s work is concerned with questions of the spiritual in art; it has been exhibited in solo and group shows across the country and internationally.

From the 1850s to the early twentieth century, glass was commonly used in photography as a support for light-sensitive emulsions, such as those made from albumen, collodion, and gelatin. These were used to coat the glass, or plate, which was then placed in the camera.

A digital media artist, painter, and sculptor trained in the Experimental Arts program at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) in Toronto. Glavin was a founding member of the Toronto collective Painting Disorders and has participated in exhibitions in Ireland, Austria, China, the United States, and Canada, among others.

An art and art history museum in Calgary, Alberta, the Glenbow Museum was formed, as the Glenbow-Alberta Institute, following Eric Lafferty Harvie’s donation of his collection of historical artifacts from Western Canada to the province of Alberta in 1966. Now the Glenbow Museum, it is dedicated to the art and culture of Western Canada, with important historical, artistic, archival, and library collections. Exhibitions at the museum focus on both art history and contemporary art.

The founder of Pace Gallery, Arne Glimcher is an art dealer and film director. He started his first gallery in Boston in 1960, moving operations to New York City in 1963. As of 2019, Pace Gallery has outposts in Beijing; Hong Kong; London; and Menlo Park, California, as well as New York. Glimcher is known for his long personal and professional relationships with the artists he represents, including Robert Irwin, Chuck Close, Louise Nevelson, and Agnes Martin, the subject of his book Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances.

Global contemporary art describes art that, beginning around the end of the Cold War, defied traditional geographical distinctions. From the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, artists had built careers by travelling to and gaining recognition in art centres such as Paris, London, and New York City, and artists outside of these centres were often peripheral to discussions of art in major museums, galleries, and universities. However, as global trade and technological connectivity increased, artists began to circulate their work globally, sending it to art fairs in cities around the world and developing international networks.

A feminist painter known for her depictions of flower pieces and for designing an Art Deco style frame called the “Gluck Frame.” A retrospective of Gluckstein’s work was held at the Fine Art Society, London, in 1973.

Trained at the Royal College of Art, London, painter H.G. Glyde is best known for his social-realist depictions of life in the Canadian Prairies. He taught drawing at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary in 1935 and was a painting instructor at the Banff School of Fine Arts between 1936 and 1966. Glyde also established the Division of Fine Art at the University of Alberta, where he taught from 1946 to 1966.

An Ottawa-based artist known for her graphite drawings and tempera paintings, Goble has sought, for over two decades, to capture the legacy of war in her artistic practice, focusing mostly on the Second World War. Among many subjects, she has depicted participants at Remembrance Day ceremonies and critically examined military family life. Her 2008 drawing Lucy and Her Family is considered one of her most important works.

Mira Godard established the Mira Godard Gallery in Toronto in 1962, which is renowned for its representation of major contemporary Canadian and international artists, including Jean Paul Riopelle, Alex Colville, David Milne, Christopher and Mary Pratt, and Takao Tanabe. In addition to being an art dealer and advocate, Godard was a founding member of the Art Dealers Association of Canada in 1967 and served as the organization’s first president.

A painter and arts educator originally from Calgary who, with four other Regina-based artists, was part of the Regina Five—a vanguard group that coalesced through a 1961 exhibition, originally mounted in their hometown, which ultimately became Five Painters from Regina, presented that same year at the National Gallery of Canada. Known as both an abstract and a figurative painter, Godwin frequently produced thematic series of works. While he did some work as a commercial artist, he also attended several workshops at the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops and taught at the University of Saskatchewan between 1964 and 1985. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 2004.

A mathematical concept applied to proportion, in which a straight line or rectangle is divided into two unequal parts: the smaller portion relates to the larger portion by the same ratio that the larger portion relates to the whole.

Historically a prosperous area of Montreal, developed between 1840 and 1930 at the base of Mount Royal, northwest of the current downtown core. Populated predominantly by Scottish Anglophones and the upper class, the area was renowned for its Victorian and Art Deco architecture and lavish estates in various styles, including Neoclassical and Romanesque. After the Second World War, many of these buildings were repurposed or demolished.

An artist and teacher who worked mostly in charcoal and watercolour, Goldhamer was an official Canadian war artist during the Second World War. His work is notable for his wartime portrayals of burned Canadian airmen at a hospital in England. Goldhamer, a former student of Arthur Lismer, was a teacher at Toronto’s Central Technical School for over four decades.

A Montreal-based artist whose work expressed a concern for the delicate and ephemeral qualities of life. Goodwin used sculpture, printmaking, painting, and drawing to bring attention to the natural characteristics of found objects. Themes of absence and loss define her work, which has earned her several national awards including the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Order of Canada (2003).

A UK-born, Toronto-based media artist, filmmaker, and producer. Gordon has collaborated with Cree artist Kent Monkman since 1996 when they formed the filmmaking partnership Urban Nation. The pair have co-directed experimental shorts, including Group of Seven Inches (2005) and Robin’s Hood (2007). The Tunguska Project (2005) was Gordon’s first feature-length documentary.

A founding member of Painters Eleven, Gordon was known for her bold abstract paintings. She taught at Hamilton Technical School and was appointed principal in 1934.

Although Constance Gore-Booth was an artist, she is more widely known as a politician and suffragist. She studied painting at the Académie Julian; later on, she was actively involved in Irish nationalist politics, eventually becoming the first women elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1918 and the first female cabinet minister in Europe as the Minister for Labour.

An abstract artist associated with Neo-Plasticism and known for his three-dimensional relief wall sculptures. A strong follower of Piet Mondrian and the Dutch abstract movement De Stijl, Gorin disrupted the linearity and strict geometric constraints of Neo-Plasticism by including circles and diagonals.

Gorky immigrated to the United States after his mother died in his arms during the Armenian genocide. Among the most eminent painters of the postwar New York School, he had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism, and he was a mentor to other artists, including Willem de Kooning.

A style of painting, sculpture, and architecture that emerged in the twelfth century in Europe. A Christian art form, it was primarily expressed through illuminated manuscripts and architecture that featured sculpture and stained glass and valued light and soaring spaces.

Gottlieb’s early representational work evolved toward the surreal and Abstract Expressionism, by which he sought to remove from cultural associations from his work in order to convey a universal language of expression. He was the first American to win the Grand Prize at the Bienal de São Paolo (1963).

An artists’ material, gouache is watercolour that is mixed with white pigment and the binding agent gum arabic, rendering it opaque. Gouache has been used in numerous painting traditions from antiquity, including manuscript illumination and Indian and European miniatures.

The London, England, branch of renowned Paris-based art dealership Goupil & Cie., the Goupil Gallery was established by Ernest Gambart in 1857 as a prints and drawings shop. In the mid-1870s it became increasingly important as an exhibiting venue for such prominent late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British and French artists as James McNeill Whistler and the Barbizon school painters. The gallery was destroyed during the Second World War.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was an influential painter of the Spanish Enlightenment whose expressive style would guide the Romantic, realist, and Impressionist painters of the nineteenth century, particularly French artists including Édouard Manet. Though he rose to prominence as a court painter for the Spanish monarchy, Goya’s drawings and etchings of the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars and Spanish struggles for independence in the early nineteenth century, none of them published during his lifetime, would prove some of his most enduring work.

A curator, writer, voice coach, and artist known for his performance art. His company, Tom Graff Exhibitions, works with galleries across Canada, and focuses on the promotion and development of Canadian art. In the 1970s, Graff was a frequent collaborator with Vancouver-based artist Gathie Falk.

An Illinois-born, New York City-based artist, writer, and curator recognized for his conceptually driven, multimedia practice, which spanned installation, sculpture, photography, film, and performance. He is best known for his outdoor pavilions, free-standing architectural structures often made of steel and glass, which were commissioned by and installed at institutions around the world. In addition to his artistic practice, he was a prolific art writer and cultural critic.

A widely collected landscape artist, K.M. (Kathleen Margaret) Graham worked in an abstract expressionist style. Attracted to the light and colours of the North, Graham made many painting trips to the Arctic beginning in 1971. She also produced drawings, prints, and graphic designs for liturgical vestments and book and magazine covers.

A highly influential modern dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Graham’s emphasis on the expressive capability of dance evoked socio-political, emotional, sexual, and visceral themes. The Graham technique, based on angular movements and maintaining opposing tension in parts of the body, offered the first major alternative to classical ballet idioms. In 1926 Graham founded the Martha Graham Dance Company, which continues to receive international acclaim.

A curator specializing in modern and contemporary art, Graham became the first director/curator of the Ottawa Art Gallery in 1989. She also held positions at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (1970s–1980s and 2000s) and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1990s). Her last position, prior to her retirement, was director of outreach and international relations at the National Gallery.

A collective of artists formed in 1988 whose fluctuating membership included Mark Simpson, Tom Kalin, Marlene McCarthy, and Loring McAlpin, among others. Gran Fury made artworks for the AIDS activist group ACT UP, including posters that spread the word about the disease and railed against government neglect of the AIDS epidemic and its victims.

Working primarily in bronze, Granet is a figurative sculptor. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in the 1950s; since then, she has worked out of a series of Parisian foundries. In addition to participating in exhibitions, Granet has completed public commissions in France and Canada, including a bust of the poet Émile Nelligan and a statue of the painter Jean Paul Riopelle, both in Montreal.

A painter, interior designer, and costume and set designer, Grant was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. His painting style was influenced by French Post-Impressionism. He was professionally, creatively, and personally connected with artist Vanessa Bell, whom he worked with as co-director of art critic Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops.

Toronto animation studio, the first private company of its kind in Canada, founded in 1949 by National Film Board animators George Dunning and Jim MacKay. Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, and Richard Williams all worked for Graphic Associates early in their careers.

A German-born photographer based in Montreal since 1976. Grauerholz’s black and white, sepia-toned, and colour photographs document vaguely familiar architectural spaces and objects that provoke meditation on the nature of collective memory. By focusing on overlooked physical aspects of museums, libraries, archives, and other sites of collective memory, Grauerholz disrupts the authoritative power of these highly regulated institutional spaces.

Al Green was a Canadian real estate developer, artist, and philanthropist supporting Jewish community programs and arts causes including the Art Gallery of Ontario. In the 1950s, Green and his company Greenwin Construction participated in Toronto’s post–Second World War housing boom, building family homes and rental high-rises. In the 1970s, he turned his attention to sculpture and was mentored by the Toronto artists Sorel Etrog and Maryon Kantaroff. Green’s work can be found in public spaces throughout the city and in private collections, as well as alongside work by Etrog, Kantaroff, and others in the Al Green Sculpture Park in midtown Toronto.

A highly influential art critic and essayist known primarily for his formalist approach and his contentious concept of modernism, which he first outlined in his 1960 publication “Modernist Painting.” Greenberg was, notably, an early champion of Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock and the sculptor David Smith.

A painter who primarily worked in watercolour, Greene was also a commercial artist after studying at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University). She was a member of the Society of Painters in Watercolour.

A Canadian art and documentary photographer, Greenhill studied photography at Ryerson Institute of Technology (now Ryerson University) in Toronto from 1949 to 1951 and subsequently worked in the Stills Photography department at the CBC for over thirty years. His oeuvre includes views of nineteenth-century Ontario architecture and engineering projects.

Edward John (E.J.) Gregory was a watercolour and oil painter and, from 1871 to 1875, illustrator for the weekly newspaper The Graphic. He was best known for portraits and scenes of daily life. Gregory was also much admired for his technical skill and his sophisticated draftsmanship, qualities that helped him win gold medals at international exhibitions during the late nineteenth century.

Greuze was a portrait and history painter known for his sentimental and moralizing genre paintings. He studied first in Lyons and then at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris after 1755 and developed a style that combined Dutch Realism with French genre painting. His style and popularity waned and were soon displaced by Neoclassicism.

A structural basis for paintings formed by a series of lines crossing each other at right angles, used most famously by Piet Mondrian. Grids affirm the common characteristics of modern painting: flatness and “all-overness,” as the critic Clement Greenberg described it.

A portrait painter who depicted influential Canadian businessmen, politicians, and others. Following studies at the Slade School of Art in London, the Scuola Libera del Nudo in Rome, and the Académie Julian in Paris, he returned to Canada in 1891 and established a portrait studio in Toronto. Grier served as president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts from 1929 to 1939, and in 1935 became the first Canadian to be knighted for his work as an artist.

A Montreal-based painter recognized for her colourful, intimate, and often emotionally and sensually charged figurative compositions. Griffiths was born in the U.K. but moved to Ottawa when she was a child. She received an MFA from Carleton University and is Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Concordia University in Montreal. Griffiths’ work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally.

A Toronto-based design and advertising firm established in 1873 to publish the weekly satirical magazine Grip. In the early twentieth century Grip Limited employed several artists who championed a distinctly Canadian style of landscape painting: Tom Thomson and some members of the future Group of Seven—Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and F.H. Varley.

A Cubist painter associated with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque known for his clear, geometric style of Synthetic Cubism and for his still lifes. Part of the Paris art scene of the early twentieth century, his friends included artists Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Gris is credited with helping to systemize and theorize the stylistic developments of Picasso and Braque.

Grisaille is a painting technique wherein an artist uses a palette of grey to create a monochromatic image. By this method, paint is carefully layered to produce highlights and shadows, resulting in an image that may appear like a colourless statue. Grisaille can also function as an underpainting or foundation over which coloured paint is later applied, or as a model for an engraving.

A prominent chronicler of 1920s Berlin, George Grosz channelled the disillusionment of his First World War experiences into socially critical and often grotesque drawings. Associated with the Berlin Dadaists, he embraced the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) movement. In 1933, following the rise to power of the National Socialist Party, Grosz immigrated to the United States, where he settled in New York City and continued to work.

A progressive and nationalistic school of landscape painting in Canada, the Group of Seven was active between 1920 (the year of the group’s first exhibition, at the Art Gallery of Toronto, now the Art Gallery of Ontario) and 1933. Founding members were the artists Franklin Carmichael, Lawren S. Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank H. Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and F.H. Varley.

A painter and illustrator influenced by the Impressionists, Guérin painted still lifes, portraits, and nudes with a subdued colour palette. His work is held at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris, and the Musée d’art de Toulon.

A London, U.K.-based photographer, curator, and writer who examines themes relating to queer experiences across cultures, migration, and race. Born in New Delhi, Gupta immigrated with his family to Montreal in 1969 where he took up an interest in photography. He studied in New York, where he participated in the Gay Liberation Movement in the 1970s and in London, where he co-founded Autograph ABP (the Association of Black Photographers) in 1988.

The developer of The Fourth Way, a spiritual movement and system for self-development based in Eastern esoteric philosophy. Gurdjieff and his followers left Russia following the 1917 revolution, eventually establishing an institute near Paris in 1922. Prominent disciples included the writers P.L. Travers and Katherine Mansfield and the esoteric mathematician P.D. Ouspensky.

Born in Winnipeg and residing in Toronto, Gurney is an artist and academic whose videos and installation projects often address the production, reception, and meaning of works of art. Her work is held in major national collections including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

A significant figure in postwar American art. Guston’s paintings and drawings range from the intensely personal and abstract to the expressly political, as with his murals of the 1930s and 1940s for the WPA Depression-era Federal Art Project. After nearly two decades of success as part of New York’s Abstract Expressionist movement, Guston triggered the anger and scorn of the art world with his return to figurative and symbolic imagery.

An artist and a leader, having served thirteen years as President of the Haida Nation, he is now Gidansda, Hereditary Chief of Skedans. His politics are very earth based and dedicated to the protection of Haida Gwaii. As a young man he worked with Bill Reid on the Skidegate Dogfish Pole, 1978, The Raven and the First Men, 1980, and the prototype for Loo Taas, 1986. Today he is a singer, carver, and cultural leader in his own right.