Kent Monkman: Postmodern

Kent Monkman is known for referencing a wide range of art historical periods and movements, from the caves at Lascaux to Modern masters.

In Postmodern, two flattened cutouts in the foreground allude to the work of Pablo Picasso. On the right is the protagonist of the 1937 La Suppliante (The Supplicant), a portrait Picasso painted a few months after he completed Guernica, a continuation of his commentary on lamentation and despair in the face of modern conflicts. On the left is a figure resembling one of the women from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a Cubist figure which Monkman referred to again in his Casualties of Modernity, a 2015 performance, installation and film.[1].

Monkman viewed Cubism and its fragmented, flattened figures as reductive, and per art historian Shirley Madill, as a “metaphor for modernity’s compression of Indigenous cultures.”[2] Echoing Madill, critic Hrag Vartanian notes that when Monkman inserts figures from modern art into his work, “he is deliberately flattening pictorial space, and bringing up the shortcomings of these figures that look crippled and violated outside their usual context. For the artist, that flattening of pictorial space is a metaphor of how indigenous cultures have been flattened aggressively over the last few centuries, but also how women have been violated in modern art as they are exploited by male artists who butchered their bodies for art.”[3]

Both cutouts are mirrored by alternate versions of themselves, which, as they rise amidst the smoke of a car crash, are restored to three-dimensionality and wholeness. They too are casualties of modernity, but in death, they appear to transcend the wreckage. Though Monkman has never shied away from difficult topics – colonialism, residential schools, social dysfunction, abuse, rape, etc. – his work is often underscored by messages of resilience and renewal. By citing both the flattened Modernist figures and their actualized counterparts, Monkman rewrites prevailing narratives.

Not content to merely fuse the modernist iconography of the 20th century with the trauma of the 21st century, Monkman layers in the problematic art historical legacy of the 19th century. In Postmodern, Monkman sets his scene of tragedy and transcendence against Albert Bierstadt’s 1897 painting Liberty Cap, Yosemite. When the Bierstadt painting was sold at Christie’s in 1999, the accompanying essay notes that it is one of the “mythic beacons of the West for which Bierstadt is most famous”[4] – precisely the sort of overly-romanticized scene that Monkman seeks to interrupt with his work.

For years Monkman has re-used and re-coded works by “heroic” 19th-century painters including Paul Kane, John Mix Stanley, George Catlin, Thomas Cole and Bierstadt, painters who made their careers by “discovering” and disseminating picturesque images and images of the “untamed” and “uncharted” West. Bierstadt, when he included figural elements in his paintings, would reduce Indigenous people to mere markers of scale, auxiliary to the territory they had long inhabited – that is, if they were included at all. Looking at Bierstadt’s landscape through a contemporary lens, the viewer can no longer see these scenes as neutral.

Madill cites Monkman, who says: “I started looking at landscape painting and North American art history as it was painted by Europeans and how they saw Indigenous people… that narrative needed to be challenged.”[5] Madill explains that for Monkman, these 19th-century paintings “were empty stages with huge potential, a perfect avenue for inserting a different story based on his lived experience.”[6] By both using and subverting the language of 19th-century European landscape painting, Monkman is able to counteract the historic erasure of Indigenous peoples and hopefully alter their narratives in the present day.

Scale is important in Monkman’s work. The size of his work reflects the imposing scale of the history paintings which the artist often references. Notably, Postmodern has been executed in a size similar to Bierstadt’s “Liberty Cap, Yosemite”. Bierstadt’s iconic painting was not a sprawling canvas, and the intimate scale is reflected here, in a size more typically found in Monkman’s studies, and uncommon in the artist’s finished works.

[1] Kent Monkman, “Casualties of Modernity,” accessed September 24, 2024
[2] Shirley Madill, Kent Monkman: Life and Work (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2022), 52
[3] Hrag Vartanian, “The Violent History of Kent Monkman,” Hyperallergic, October 31, 2019
[4] “Liberty Cap, Yosemite, Albert Bierstadt,” Christie’s, accessed September 24, 2024
[5] Madill, 78. [6] Madill, 78.

We are pleased to offer Postmodern in our major fall auction of First Nations Art, online through to November 28.

About the Auction

Our major fall auction of First Nations Art includes an important work by Kent Monkman, as well as works by Norval Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier, Norman Tait, David Neel, Chief Henry Speck Sr., Tim Paul, Robert Charles Davidson, Corey Bulpitt, and others.

Public Previews

Previews are available at our Toronto gallery, located at 100 Broadview Avenue:

Saturday, November 23 from 12 noon to 4 pm
Sunday, November 24 from 12 noon to 4 pm
Monday, November 25 from 10 am to 5 pm
Tuesday, November 26 from 10 am to 5 pm

Or by appointment.

Please contact us for any further information.