Kamloops Art Gallery Hosts "Cities of Canada ~ The Seagram Collection"

Thursday, 01 February 2007 23:38

Kamloops, BC, Canada - The Kamloops Art Gallery is delighted to host Cities of Canada: The Seagram Collection, a touring exhibition from Montreal’s prestigious McCord Museum, until March 18, 2007.  A fascinating journey into our nation’s past, Cities of Canada is drawn from an original exhibition of paintings from the 1950s, commissioned by the legendary Canadian businessman Samuel Bronfman, head of the Seagram whiskey empire.  The exhibition at the Kamloops Art Gallery features 39 striking historical paintings of Canadian cities, guaranteed to inspire both nostalgia and pride in our nation’s progress.

The paintings in Cities of Canada were made by a variety of well-known and emerging Canadian artists in the 1950s, and were commissioned by Bronfman as part of the whisky baron’s attempt to dispel what he regarded as the false stereotype of Canada as a vast, untamed wilderness. His touring show of 90 commissioned paintings of urban centers traveled to London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Stockholm, The Hague, Madrid, Loest (West Germany), San Juan, Havana, Mexico City, Caracas, Rio de Janiero, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, as well as across Canada.  The itinerary for this Canadian exhibition was unprecedented in its time. Many of the remarkable paintings selected for the current exhibition had not been displayed in public since 1967 until last year, when Cities of Canada: The Seagram Collection opened at the McCord Museum.

Curated by Ihor Holubizky for the McCord Museum, this incarnation of Cities of Canada revisits key works from its namesake exhibition, examines the unique moment of their creation, and links them to Canada’s emerging presence on the post-war global scene.  A new Canadian identity was emerging in the 1950s, with a booming population and unprecedented growth of cities, and the paintings in Cities of Canada reflect this shifting character. Among the works in this collection are paintings by such recognizable artists as A.Y. Jackson, Robert Pilot, Goodridge Roberts, and Frederick B. Taylor.