Jock Macdonald:
The Search for New Forms of Beauty

Curated by Joyce Zemans

Abstract painting by Jock Macdonald with large areas of blue and black punctuated by smaller areas of red, yellow, and light blue.

Jock Macdonald (1897–1960) was a trailblazer in Canadian art from the 1930s to 1960 and the first painter to exhibit abstract art in Vancouver. Throughout his life he championed Canadian avant-garde artists at home and abroad. Searching always for a personal abstraction that would capture the spiritual and scientific aspects of the natural world, this renowned member of Painters Eleven helped bring Canadian art into the twentieth century. For more on Jock Macdonald read Joyce Zemans’s Jock Macdonald: Life & Work.

About the Curator: Joyce Zemans

Joyce Zemans, C.M., is an art historian, curator, critic, teacher, and administrator. Her research has focused on the development of abstraction in Canadian art; the role of twenty-first-century museums; the formation of the art-historical canon; and the status of women artists. She is a former Dean of Fine Arts, York University, and Director of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Banner Image: Jock Macdonald, Legend of the Orient (detail), 1958, oil and Lucite 44 on Masonite, 137.2 x 121.9 cm, private collection, Toronto.