Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

1955 was an important year for Coughtry, marking his first exhibition – a two-man show with Michael Snow at the University of Toronto’s Hart House. Coughtry and Snow hit the jackpot when then-Mayor Nathan Phillips demanded their paintings be removed from public view on the grounds of obscenity, which catapulted the two artists to the forefront of the national conversation. The attention inspired Coughtry’s famous remark that “every damn tree in the country has been painted.” It would prompt impassioned and radical developments by his fellow artists at the Isaacs Gallery, a group that included Snow, Joyce Wieland, Gordon Rayner, Dennis Burton, and others. It is within this context that Coughtry saw fit to return repeatedly, and perhaps unexpectedly, to the figurative: to bodies at once abstracted and resolved by their own energy.

In Greek mythology, Danaë was a princess imprisoned by her father, King Acrisius, to prevent a prophecy that her son would kill him. She was then visited by Zeus, who took the form of a shower of gold; nine months later, Danaë gave birth to Perseus. By a twist of fate, Perseus accidentally kills Acrisius when a discus veers off course. Despite his best attempts, Acrisius proves that trying to avoid fate only ensures it happens.

Coughtry had graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1953, and left immediately for a year in Europe, funded by the Eaton Travelling Scholarship. These European influences can be felt in Danaë, from the choice of classical subject – Danaë has been a popular subject since the Renaissance, interpreted by artists including Rembrandt, Titian, and Klimt – to the luminous colours and silhouetted forms inspired by Pierre Bonnard and Alberto Giacometti, whose works influenced Coughtry. In Danaë we see the artist balance figuration with abstraction, offering a compelling synthesis of classical narrative and modernist sensibility.