Place and Standing in Canadian Art: Jack Humphrey and the Discourses of Regionalism, 1930–1967
Year: 2023
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The concept of place is an important and often underestimated aspect of Canadian art and its historiography.How does it serve to define, classify, or declassify certain art and artists?How does it function to determine standing in the Canadian art world?This dissertation considers the concept of place and why it matters in the history of Canadian art.Specifically, it considers the place-based signification inherent in the concept of regionalism, and the ways that "regionalism" has functioned to assign value and meaning in Canadian art history.It does so by employing the case study as its methodology, focussing on the life and art of New Brunswick painter Jack Humphrey (1901-1967).Recognized during his lifetime as a modernist painter, Humphrey was nevertheless often defined by his "regionalism" in the critical, curatorial and art historical discourses of his day.The time period of the study is 1930 to 1967, the decades of the Great Depression, the Second World War and the postwar years when culture played a critical role in the formation of a modern Canadian nation.This dissertation follows two threads.The first is the concept of regionalism as a discursive formation, one that serves to define and delimit "regional" art and artists as conservative, minor, and antimodernist.In effect, it serves to disembody place by means of its hegemonic structuring principles.The dissertation's second thread seeks to disrupt regionalism's disembodying effects by focussing on the lived experience of place and its meaning in the everyday.The case study serves both threads.It provides a lens through which to view the concept of regionalism in a centralist narrative.It discloses regionalism's antimodernist tropes, and its assumptions and statements of backwardness and conservatism.At the iv same time, by presenting a narrative of the life lived, the case study offers rich discontinuities that disrupt regionalism's discursive truisms.Bringing together life and art as the lived experience of place is a rereading and restaging of art history, inserting situated knowledge into its interpretative frames.This is a refocussing of the object of study itself; that is, an embodied art history in which place, among other lived experiences, defines the subject of inquiry.
Author: Gemey June Kelly
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4396515312