The Cause of Art: Professionalizing the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador

by Jeff Webb

Overview

In 1949, Newfoundland and Labrador had a widely celebrated oral culture but little visual art. After entering the Canadian federation, recreational painters worked to create a venue for the display of art. The Cause of Art tells the story of the advocates, curators, and professional artists who laid the foundation for an artistic community in the province.

The Memorial University Art Gallery was the site of a struggle between recreational painters who aspired to express their creative impulse and develop a Newfoundland art, and curators who wanted artists to participate in the Canadian art market and international artistic movements. The book recounts the history of passionate and strong-willed curators and cultural administrators who fought for control of the gallery. It reveals how they appealed to competing conceptions of professionalization, as well as diverse political and aesthetic preferences.

Based on extensive archival research in previously unexamined collections, and oral interviews with key informants, this book examines a cultural institution that is widely remembered as the centre of the cultural renaissance in late twentieth-century Newfoundland and Labrador. As a result, The Cause of Art illuminates the relationship between the state and the university during a key period in the modernization of the province.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487555344
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	05/30/2024
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jeff A. Webb is a professor and head of the Department of History at Memorial University.

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Introduction

1. The Cause of Art

2. The Struggle for Control

3. The Field or the Flower

4. The Crossroads and Command Post

5. A Forum and Focus for the Visual Arts

6. A More Viable Place to Live and Make Art

Acknowledgments and Note on Sources

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

“The Cause of Art is a breakthrough study that establishes the key role played by the Memorial University of Newfoundland Art Gallery in the emergence of a vital visual arts community in post-Confederation Newfoundland. Jeff A. Webb situates this history in the broader processes of modernization and the development of the administrative state in both the new province and the emerging nation of Canada it joined in 1949. Engaging and insightful, The Cause of Art is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the cultural state in Canada.”—Lynda Jessup, Queen’s University
“This book provides a comprehensive history of the professionalization of art in Newfoundland and Labrador through the lens of its provincial gallery. Jeff A. Webb’s exhaustively researched book brings a regional institutional history of the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador into larger conversations about gender, labour, and class within the Canadian arts, as well as the concept of arts ‘professionalism’ in ways that remain significant to locality and place.”—Erin Morton, St. Francis Xavier University

From the Publisher