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25-685: Walter Abell organized the Maritime Art Association while a professor of Art at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia . The MAA’s constitution was ratified at the Association’s first annual meeting held in Saint John, New Brunswick at the end of March 1935, and Abell was elected its President. Violet Gillett succeeded Abell as president and edited the short-lived Maritime Arts Bulletin . Gillett's mission as president

50-557: A membership of seventeen groups in fourteen centres within two years, and would continue to maintain these numbers for the coming decade. he creation of many local art societies, such as the Fredericton Art Club and another at Charlottetown, were the immediate result of the formation of the MAA. Through the association's program of traveling exhibitions, lecture series, radio broadcasts on the arts, and various other activities,

75-595: Is extant to confirm this. The artist also began a draft of a book on her experiences on the west coast. It is possible that MacLeod's mother may have destroyed her book draft since Marian Dale Scott has stated that the artist's mother destroyed much of her early work. MacLeod travelled west again in 1928 to paint in the Upper Skeena River area. She wrote about her travels for the Canadian National Railway Company's magazine and

100-648: The Armed Forces as means of showcasing the war from a female perspective. MacLeod was a person "whose passion, enthusiasm, and activism touched those around her ... it is that quality of engagement that marks her work - immediate, vital pictures, crammed with activity...." Following the Second World War she returned to depicting the scenes of New York City and in 1947 exhibited her oil and water colour paintings in Toronto, Ottawa, and Fredericton under

125-1021: The Kingston Conference in June 1941, the magazine was refocused and renamed to Canadian Arts in 1943, with the help of the National Gallery of Canada . Walter Abell Walter Halsey Abell (1897–1956) was an American Art teacher and theoretician. Walter Halsey Abell was born in 1897 in Brooklyn , New York. The Barnes Foundation sponsored him to study in France. He became a teacher of art and an art theoretician, interpreting art from Marxist and psychological viewpoints. He taught at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (1925–27). Abell taught at Acadia University in Wolfville , Nova Scotia, Canada from 1928 to 1943. He

150-408: The Maritime Art Association positioned the arts to become an arena for regional discussion, appreciation and solidarity. The MAA’s exhibition programme of about eight shows per year was its most effective instrument for aesthetic development. The MAA annual exhibition, with its wide variety of regional artists and enthusiastic newspaper coverage, was perhaps the most successful strategy for constructing

175-688: The Observatory Art Centre, for aspiring artists at the University of New Brunswick . A painter of people and landscapes, her artworks tend to reveal a sombre though joyful, reflective and humanitarian insight. In 1927 and 1928, encouraged by ethnographer Marius Barbeau , MacLeod travelled to the west and northwest of Canada. Thanks to Barbeau and to the Canadian Pacific Railway , MacLeod received free transportation on her summer trip. She painted at Morley Station in

200-680: The Stoney First Nations in the major exhibition, West Coast Art – Native and Modern organized the National Gallery of Canada in December 1927. This exhibition was, and has been, much written about and marks the first real effort to include the cultural production of Northwest Coast First Nations within the institutionalization of Canadian art history. During her travels in 1927, MacLeod is said to have created notebooks and drawings according to her friends. However, nothing

225-545: The T. Eaton Company. This position had a strong influence on her art, as demonstrated by her painting A Descent of Lilies (1935). MacLeod was art editor of The Canadian Forum from 1935 to 1936 and helped to establish the Picture Loan Society. MacLeod was opposed to World War II, though in 1944 she accepted a commission by the National Gallery of Canada to paint many scenes depicting the Women's Division of

250-581: The article marks her first important foray into art writing. The solo exhibition Portraits, Landscapes and Studies by Pegi Nicol was held in Montreal at the Leonardo Society from February 4–11, 1928 and in the same year she was invited to show with the Group of Seven in Toronto. In the late 1920s, MacLeod moved from Ottawa to Montreal, and then to Toronto, where she worked on window displays for

275-484: The delegates at the Kingston conference that Canada was a "cultural plutocracy ... determined by a small group possessing great wealth." He proposed that experiments in children's art, folk art and amateur creative workshops were "movements of modern art that have broken old forms and prepared the way for new ones, with increasing emphasis upon the creative possibilities in the common man." The Kingston conference led to

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300-683: The first director of the National Gallery of Canada . Through Brown and his wife, Maud, Nicol developed friendships with artists in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, as well as leading figures of the Canadian cultural and social establishment, including Vincent Massey and his wife, Alice Massey. She began a five-year relationship with Richard Finnie by 1925. She married Norman MacLeod on December 10, 1936. The couple then moved to New York City , but she returned annually to Fredericton, New Brunswick , where, with Lucy Jarvis in 1940, she opened an art centre,

325-675: The foothills of the Rockies and among the Stoney First Nations. During her time in British Columbia MacLeod met artist Emily Carr , whose work exerted an influence on her own. Pegi stayed in Calgary with the F.G. Garbutt family, who were strong supporters of the arts. The Garbutts and MacLeod stayed friends for life. While there, Pegi painted a portrait of Alice Garbutt that demonstrates her increasing use of strong contour lines. MacLeod exhibited two of her portrait studies of

350-792: The foundation of the Federation of Canadian Artists in 1941. The Federation was divided into regions, each with a regional organizer. Abell was head of the Maritimes region. Walter Abell's journal Maritime Art became Canadian Art in 1943 when Abell moved to Ottawa to join the staff of the Art Centre of the National Gallery of Canada . Abell moved on to Michigan State University where he taught from 1943 to 1956. He died in 1956 in East Lansing , Michigan. Pegi Nicol Pegi Nicol MacLeod , (17 January 1904 – 12 February 1949),

375-422: The identity of the regional art community. Its lecture circuit of speakers from both within and outside the Maritimes was highly promoted by the MAA, and radio talks and later a slide collection would also be part of its cultural mandate. Local squabbles and regional jealousies came to the forefront over the Association’s performance during World War II . Other internal problems arose from the diverse resources of

400-667: The member organizations; others were the result of ineptitude. Nevertheless the MAA created an infrastructure for the promotion and dissemination of art in the Maritimes – despite or perhaps in recognition of the difficulties imposed first by the Depression and then by the Second World War. With the aid of a grant from the Carnegie Corporation , Walter Abell started the publication Maritime Art in 1940. The magazine helped to spread news of artists' work; in three years, Abell edited and designed fifteen issues. Following

425-667: The school. The art critic Donald Buchanan attributed her and many of her classmates' interest in the figure and portraiture to their training at the École. She was at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal with Paul-Émile Borduas , Lillian Freiman , Goodridge Roberts , Anne Savage , and Marian Scott , who would all go on to become established artists in their own right. In 1932 she won the Willingdon Arts Competition prize for painting. She lived in Toronto from 1934 to 1937 and became good friends with Eric Brown ,

450-526: The title "Manhattan Cycle." The Manhattan Cycle , which she called alternatively "Canadian Painter in New York" or "Black Life from a Fifth Floor Window", focused on the people and scenes around MacLeod's apartment on East 88th Street in New York. She wrote to her friend and fellow artist, Isabel McLaughlin in 1946 that she had been involved with 88th street for six years and still found it fascinating. The Manhattan Cycle consisted of 110 artworks by 1947 and

475-592: The war where Pegi finished her early education at the Ottawa Collegiate Institute. In 1921 MacLeod enrolled at the newly re-established Art Association of Ottawa school . She studied art under Franklin Brownell from 1922 to 1923. In 1923 she moved to Montreal to study at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal with Edwin Holgate . There was an emphasis on figure study and life drawing at

500-602: Was a Canadian painter whose modernist self-portraits, figure studies, paintings of children, still lifes and landscapes are characterized by a fluidity of form and vibrant colour. Born Margaret Kathleen Nichol, she was a teacher, war artist and arts activist. In 1936 she became a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour and one year later she joined the Canadian Group of Painters . She

525-594: Was born in Listowel, Ontario , to William Wallace Nichol and Myrtle Ivy Riggs. Pegi was their only child. The family moved to Ottawa in 1908 when Pegi was four where her father became principal of the Ottawa Technical School. The family lived on Frank Street and Pegi attended elementary at Cartier Street School. In 1914, when war broke out, the family moved to Toronto and Pegi attended Harbord Collegiate Institute . The Nichols returned to Ottawa after

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550-524: Was editor, but Violet Gillett was responsible for production of the first issues. In the late 1930s Abell saw Canadian modernists, particularly women such as Pegi Nicol and perhaps Paraskeva Clark , as a "very important group of young Canadian painters ... more important than the Group of Seven." André Charles Biéler organized the first conference of Canadian artists in Kingston, Ontario . Abell told

575-614: Was one of the first professors of fine art at a Canadian university. Abell helped to found the Maritime Art Association , and was founding editor of Maritime Art . The first issue of Maritime Art , the first magazine in Canada devoted to the visual arts, appeared in October 1940. The Carnegie Corporation provided a small grant to help with starting up, and the Maritime Art Association gave organizational support. Abell

600-466: Was the first time MacLeod exhibited a series of works in Canada focused entirely on her time in New York. The Cycle also toured to the Winnipeg School of Art at the request of Joe Plaskett and then on to Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria, and Vancouver in 1948. A major retrospective of her work was held at Galerie Walter Klinkhoff in 1982 and a circulating retrospective exhibition

625-567: Was to steer the organization from art appreciation, towards community involvement in art. The Association’s objective was: "to promote a knowledge and appreciation of art; to foster art activities in the Maritime Provinces by uniting for cooperative effort, all interested groups and individuals, by securing and offering for circulation, exhibitions of fine and applied art," as well as "arranging for lectures and for engaging in such other activities to promote these aims." The MAA attracted

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