PROVENANCE
Monica Bain, Vancouver and then Los Angeles
Modern, Contemporary and Latin American Art, Bonhams & Butterfields, Los Angeles, November 17, 2009, lot 1052
The Collection of Torben V. Kristiansen, Vancouver

Gordon Appelbe Smith, following his distinguished military service in the Second World War, enrolled in the Vancouver School of Art, from which he graduated in 1944. He then began a lengthy teaching career, initially at the Vancouver School of Art and later at the University of British Columbia. Smith’s career as an artist is marked by his long interest in both abstraction and the natural world. Indeed, some of his most distinguished work brings allusions to nature into compositions that are essentially abstract.

Untitled is a wonderful example of Smith’s ability to bring together natural allusions and a strong command of abstract form. The painting hints at Smith’s close observation of his environment—the black calligraphic forms suggest trees, but Smith has deliberately avoided specificity. Similarly, the central band of white pigment might be a patch of brightly lit ground, but equally acts as a formal element that divides the composition.

What is clear is that the entire surface is animated by Smith’s sure brushwork, which activates the composition. The viewer’s eye is drawn to every part of the painting, and Smith’s vivid brushwork ensures that the viewer is never bored. Untitled vibrates with energy, with the black elements forming a staccato rhythm across the canvas. Smith’s use of colour has been equally acute—the bright patch of yellow and orange in the right foreground is brilliantly contrasted with the patches of purple and orange more centrally placed.

The work exudes an energetic vitality and suggests Smith’s strong affinity with the coastal landscape, while not clearly defining a subject. This deliberate ambiguity is part of Smith’s genius. While Smith never loses touch with the beauty of the natural world, which he deeply appreciated, he does not allow too great a specificity to impede our appreciation of his composition. Where some may see a highly abstracted landscape, the work can equally well be read as an entirely abstract composition.

The vitality of his brushwork means that the eye never rests in the work. The speed of our view across the canvas is controlled by the strong visual pattern of the black linear elements and the individual bursts of colour. In other words, Smith carefully guides our viewing of the canvas itself, speeding up the eye in some areas and slowing it down in others. While there is much activity on the surface of the canvas—look, for example, at the enormous variety of brush-strokes—the composition as a whole has a decisive unity.

Although we cannot precisely date this painting, it likely comes from the later fifties, a period when Smith and many of his colleagues were exploring abstraction. Of Smith’s work during this period, Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris wrote: “Here indeed is a true artist, whose work has the finest textural qualities, a restrained richness of colour values, the most satisfying paint qualities and the most forthright balance of all that goes to make a work of art satisfying and great.”[1] Harris’s words aptly describe Untitled.

We thank Ian M. Thom, Senior Curator—Historical at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 1988 to 2018, for contributing the above essay. Thom is the author of Gordon Smith: The Act of Painting, published in 1997.

1. Lawren Harris, untitled note, November 1958, Gordon Smith files, Vancouver Art Gallery Library.

For the biography on Torben V. Kristiansen in PDF format, please click here.

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