ARCA BCSFA CGP OSA P11
1897 - 1960
Canadian
Through Shifting Sands
oil and Lucite 44 on canvas
signed and dated 1959 and on verso signed, titled, dated, inscribed "P x 1 Montreal" and stamped Cameron Gal. 63.1403 on the Museum of Modern Art loan label
48 3/4 x 58 1/2 in, 123.8 x 148.6 cm
Estimate: $20,000 - $30,000 CAD
Sold for: $58,250
Preview at: Heffel Toronto – 13 Hazelton Ave
PROVENANCE
Dorothy Cameron Gallery, Toronto
Canadian Art, Joyner, May 22, 1998, lot 206
Kaspar Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, London
Private Collection, Toronto
LITERATURE
Dorothy Pfeiffer, "Painters Eleven," Montreal Gazette, April 16, 1960, mentioned page 61
Kay Kritzwiser, "$4,500 Tag on One of Painter's Last Works," The Globe and Mail, June 20, 1964, mentioned page 19
Joyce Zemans, Jock MacDonald: The Inner Landscape, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1981, reproduced page 235 and listed page 287
EXHIBITED
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Painters Eleven, April 8 - 30, 1960
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Jock MacDonald: The Inner Landscape, April 4 - May 17, 1981, traveling to the Art Gallery of Windsor; The Edmonton Art Gallery; the Winnipeg Art Gallery; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1981 - 1982, catalogue #141
This major work, produced at the very end of Jock MacDonald’s career, shows the exploratory vision of an artist at the height of his powers. A founding member of Painters 11 in the early 1950s, MacDonald had already spent decades investigating an increasingly personal approach to painting. As early as the 1930s, MacDonald explored symbolism and cosmic imagery, leading to his semi-abstract fantasias of the 1940s. By the end of the 1950s, he was creating dreamlike worlds such as this one, comprised of floating forms adrift in ethereal hazes of atmosphere.
While this work hung in the Musee des Beaux Arts de Montreal’s 1960 Painters 11 survey, it may also have been exhibited a few years afterwards. A label on verso notes the work as loaned to the Museum of Modern Art via Dorothy Cameron Gallery. An inventory number suggests a date of 1963, which overlaps closely with the years Cameron was known to be in possession of the work. While the city in question is not noted, Grace Morley, the inaugural director of the San Fransico Museum of Modern Art, was an admirer of MacDonald’s, having arranged a solo exhibition of his work in 1946. While the details of this theoretical 1963 exhibition are currently unknown, its possibility speaks to the international relevance of MacDonald’s important body of work.
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