Provenance:

Private Collection, British Columbia.

Note:

Dynamic, lucid essays, which combine abstraction and cubism, are typical of the work from 1949 (the year of Cubist Abstraction) by the resourceful and important Painters Eleven member Hortense Gordon. However, Cubist Abstraction is of an unusually large size and brightness of colour in her oeuvre of this moment, perhaps because she created this painting as a commission (The verso of the painting features a label, likely created by her niece Reva Colerick, who handled Gordon’s estate, which reads “order from Ben’s Restaurant, Montreal”).

As with much of Gordon’s work, the effect is at once lyrical and filled with rhythmic energy. Recognizable objects here maintain their identities when Gordon strips them of their original contexts by detailing their shapes and arranging them by form. Inevitably, suggestive associations emerge.

Gordon likely received the Ben’s Restaurant commission on one of the many visits she made to Montreal as she developed a warm working relationship with Gallery dealer Agnes Lefort. In November 1953, an important one-person show of Gordon’s work travelled to Galerie Agnes Lefort, after it had opened the previous February at the Creative Gallery in New York and had been exhibited widely at public galleries in both the United States and Canada. The opening of the show in Montreal coincided with a meeting of the Royal Canadian Academy and would have served as something of an object lesson for that group of an artist who could use abstraction and related insights to illuminating effect.

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