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PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
Estate of the Artist
Private Collection, Toronto

Saskatchewan painter William Perehudoff was extensively involved in the exuberant international discourses and practices of mid-twentieth-century abstraction. Through the exchanges afforded by the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops especially, he gained a fluency in this visual language. He participated in classes led by critic Clement Greenberg and artists Kenneth Noland and Donald Judd, among others. In 1988, he led the workshop and thus passed on his own signature style and priorities around abstraction. One readily thinks of comparisons with other artists when looking at Perehudoff’s work—Jack Bush from Toronto, Noland from the USA—comparisons that, above all, acknowledge that he was in active conversation with these and other progressive artists and their work.

AC-63-3 is a complex and satisfying painting that repays prolonged attention. It can be read as one complex, rectangular motif set atop a uniform ground. We can clearly see at the bottom of the vertical grey-olive green line that these forms are on top of the raw canvas support. But we can also see the forms as independently arrayed on the underlying colour: moving from left to right, a two-colour rectangle with brown and aqua inserts, a negative space, then a thin grey olive-green line, a wider negative space, and a two-part rectangle floating independently on the surface at the right. What is intriguing about this work is that one does not have to choose between these (and other) descriptions. Perhaps one cannot choose definitively, with the happy result that the painting continually asks questions of its viewer.

Another satisfying subtlety in AC-63-3 is the reciprocity—but lack of similarity—between left and right. A blue form is set into a notch in the brown form on the right. There is almost no overlap but instead some gentle contact across the small gaps between forms. On the left, a correspondingly hued but significantly larger brown form fits into a welcoming space in the blue rectangle, which is accompanied here by an aqua-blue band. In a hard-edged abstract painting of this time, geometry would rule such relationships. All measurements and correspondences would be exact. But Perehudoff’s work remains painterly, obviously a product of the “accidents” of hand work. It is carefully and expertly balanced but reckoned by eye. Where much twentieth-century abstraction sought to create an irrefragable universal language (think of Piet Mondrian’s Neoplasticism and the Wassily Kandinsky of the Bauhaus years), this painting speaks a local dialect, that of Perehudoff himself.

Individual as his work was, in it Perehudoff partook of one of the most influential movements in abstract art of the past century, famously defined by Greenberg as “post-painterly abstraction” in a 1964 touring exhibition of that name (organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and seen in Minneapolis and Toronto). To understand where Perehudoff and this painting fit in this history, we need to recall Greenberg’s articulation of PPA (as it was known):

The reaction presented here is largely against the mannered drawing and the mannered design of Painterly Abstraction, but above all against the last. By contrast with the interweaving of light and dark gradations in the typical Abstract Expressionist picture, all the artists in this show move towards a physical openness of design, or towards linear clarity, or towards both. They continue, in this respect, a tendency that began well inside Painterly Abstraction itself, in the work of artists like Still, Newman, Rothko, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Mathieu, the 1950-54 Kline, and even Pollock. A good part of the reaction against Abstract Expressionism is,...a continuation of it.[1]

AC-63-3’s thin washes of an almost purplish brown, a saturated dark blue, a light aqua blue and a grey olive green, all floating on the support of raw canvas, are his alone, and yet they partake in the affirmative directions of PPA. The forms are in intimate conversation with one another and with the history of abstract painting in Canada and beyond.

We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto and author of two books on abstract art—The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting and Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the 60s—for contributing the above essay.

1. Post Painterly Abstraction (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1964), exhibition catalogue, para. 7 of essay, available at http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/ppaessay.html. Perehudoff was not in this exhibition but could easily have been.

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