Provenance:

Estate of the artist.
Mary Hare (daughter of the artist), Oshawa.
David Hare (grandson of the artist), Oshawa.
Private Collection, Ontario.

Literature:

“To Disagree Harmoniously – Object of ‘Painters Eleven’”, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, February 13, 1954, page 16.
“One Man Shows, Lesson: Don’t Discount Consumer”, The Globe and
Mail, Toronto, January 22, 1955, page 10.

Exhibited:

Painters 11, Roberts Gallery, Toronto, February 13-27, 1954.
Alexandra Luke, Robertson Gallery, Ottawa, March, 1954.
Alexandra Luke, Eglinton Gallery, Toronto, Januray 14 – February 9, 1956.
Alexandra Luke, Heliconian Club, Toronto, October, 1968, no.7.

Note:

Alexandra Luke was a key figure in the abstract painting movement in Canada and particularly in the group known as Painters Eleven (1953-1960), in which she was a member. Working and showing their work together, Painters Eleven developed a highly energized and intriguing interaction, which brought out the best in the art of many of its members.

Luke’s inclusion of The Cloister in the first show of Painters Eleven at Roberts Gallery in 1954 suggests its importance to her and to the burgeoning abstract movement: it is a keynote work of the Eleven and a cornerstone to her oeuvre. It is an almost unique offering for the artist, one which combines a sense of what painting meant to her with an indication of what looks like exceptional foreknowledge on her part of a much later painting movement, that of post-modernism. Both aspects can be deduced from the detail of a monk on a balcony at night in the upper right corner. It sets the tone for the way Luke approached painting – as an acolyte seeking wisdom – and for the meaning of painting to her, as a way of achieving spiritual peace within an excitingly urban world.

The painting is related to a painting in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Untitled, (oil on canvas, 97 x 84 cm, c. 1951, purchased in 1993,no. 36833), however The Cloister is much more harmoniously realized and sophisticated in its approach. Its muted palette and lively surface reflect Luke’s orientation towards the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York. Luke, influenced by Hans Hofmann, her teacher, held that colour in itself determined painting structure, that plastic values were the sole content of a work, that painting’s medium is the flat canvas. Luke felt she could create depth through vibrant juxtapositions of painting elements. As in other of her works, her subject here involves energy in the form of movement, growth, an expansive rhythm, even perhaps a spray of sound. In The Cloister, the artist has depicted the urban scene and the place of the solitary artist within it with adventurousness. “A combination of earthy sights and ideas,” Pearl McCarthy called it, in the Globe & Mail, February 13, 1954.

We would like to thank art historian, Joan Murray, for contributing the foregoing essay.