Lot 576
Walter Hawley Yarwood, RCA (1917-1996), Canadian
Additional Images
Provenance:
Private Collection, Toronto, ON
Note:
Walter Yarwood’s Uptown exquisitely captures the spirit of Toronto’s Painters Eleven (1953-1960) at the moment of its greatest ambition and verve. Advanced art-making in Toronto had finally grasped abstract painting that did not derive from something in the visible world. Yarwood’s training at Toronto’s Central Technical High School had helped him to develop a career and network in Toronto’s advertising industry that connected him with Painters Eleven’s future members, most importantly Oscar Cahén (1916-1956), who invited him to join the group. Through the Painters Eleven years Yarwood focused on expressive abstractions such as Uptown; after the group’s dissolution, he shifted his focus to sculpture and made works that became part of the fabric of public sculpture in Toronto, especially in the Queen’s Park complex of office buildings and on the University of Toronto campus.
Uptown (1958) is a lively, luminous painting, evocative of his friend Cahén’s work of 1954-1956 (for example Untitled,1956, Art Gallery of Ontario, no.58/69) that uses bold strokes of viscous white paint atop a network of cadmium, chrome yellow, magenta, and blue passages laid over a network of warm black drawing. In contrast to the demonstrative abstraction of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Yarwood emphasises a pictorial strain of post-war “American-type” abstraction exemplified by the considered and painterly work of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) in the middle 1950s. À propos to de Kooning’s Gotham News (1955, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, no. K1955:6) that was acquired the year it was made by the cutting-edge Albright Art Gallery (now, AKG Art Museum) in nearby Buffalo, New York, Uptown’s luminosity echoes de Kooning’s own shimmering light. Given Buffalo’s proximity to Toronto and the Albright’s progressive collecting mandates, the de Kooning was likely a subject of keen interest to the Torontonians on the trips they commonly made there. For all three, and clearly in Uptown, the paintings refer to nothing specific. In Uptown, Yarwood’s evocation of light from the natural world and creation of depth, light and volume captivates and transports us to another, painted, world.