The Winnipeg Art Gallery Hosts Charles Comfort

Wednesday, 31 January 2007 10:26

WINNIPEG, MB.,CANADA - Painter, muralist, teacher, war artist, director of the National Gallery of Canada, Charles Comfort was a seminal figure in 20th century Canadian art.  Now The Winnipeg Art Gallery presents Take Comfort – The Career of Charles Comfort, an exhibition featuring iconic paintings symbolic of Canada’s emergence into the modern era.  There will be a free public opening of the show at 7:30pm, Thursday, February 8.  The exhibition continues until April 29.

Following upon the nationalism of the Group of Seven painters, Comfort is best-known for the expression of socially conscious and universal messages in his landscapes and memorable portraits of Depression-era Canada.  Unlike the Group’s characteristic focus on Canada’s wilderness, Comfort explored the imprint of people on the landscape, with a particular focus on industrial imagery.

Born in Scotland in 1900, Comfort emigrated to Winnipeg with his family as a child.  At 14 he began working at the commercial art firm Bridgens of Winnipeg. In 1925 he moved to Toronto, becoming a respected commercial artist, a successful painter, and a valued teacher at the Ontario College of Art and the University of Toronto.  Considered a groundbreaking mural painter in the late 1930s, his bold painting commissions promoted Canada as a young country emerging as a socially and economically strong country.  A highlight of the exhibition is his monumental Romance of Nickel which was painted for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. 

In addition to a broad survey of his career from sensitive studies of Manitoba and the Lake of the Woods in the 1920s through to his abstract paintings of the 1960s, a special feature of the exhibition is a focus on his work as an official war artist during the Second World War.  Sent overseas to record the activities of Canadian troops, Comfort rose above the documentary style to depict the humanity of war found in its portraits of soldiers, battles, and haunting destruction.