Among Bauhaus alumni, Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Kepes and the textile artist Marli Ehrman inspired Canadian artists. Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris brought the touring Société Anonyme exhibition from the Albright Museum in Buffalo to the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1927. The first exhibition of Modernism in Canada, it included multiple Bauhaus-era paintings by Itten, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky and Klee.
Though the exhibition had limited resonance among Canadian artists, a few did study with Bauhaus alumni – Gordon Webber and Richard Filipowski with Ehrman, Kepes with Moholy-Nagy, and Dorothea Rockburne with Albers. Of these, only Webber returned to Canada, where he was renowned as a teacher. His students Claude Toussignant and Guido Molinari credit him with having launched their careers as geometric abstract artists in Montreal.
Inspired by an encounter with Moholy-Nagy at the School of Design in 1943, and his reading of Charles Biederman, after his move to Saskatoon in 1950, Eli Bornstein spearheaded Canadian Structurism. Working with students like Elizabeth Willmott and Ron Kostyniuk, Bornstein developed this Canadian variety of colour-based relief art, and his journal The Structurist published articles by Moholy-Nagy, Kepes and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, among others.
In the 1950s, Kandinsky’s and Klee’s student Andor Weininger produced works riffing on their visual themes. The Russian’s effect extended to Alex Janvier, a founder of the Winnipeg-based Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., who adapted Kandinsky’s abstract symbolic language to express his Dene/Saulteaux heritage. While Alfred Pellan’s art was inspired by Klee as early as the 1930s, Klee’s popularity soared in early 1950s Toronto and his influence can be seen in the work of Michael Snow. As late as the 1970s, during a stay in Calgary, Bauhausler Kurt Kranz produced Klee-inspired watercolours.
Rockburne is the only Canadian known to have studied with Albers, but he had an indirect impact on Regina Five members Kenneth Lochhead and Arthur McKay. The pair established a two-week summer workshop at Emma Lake in 1955 while teaching at Regina College. Often headed by prominent Americans such as Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland and Clement Greenberg, the Emma Lake Workshops gained an international reputation. Noland, who had studied with Albers at Black Mountain College, held the 1963 Workshop. The effect on McKay and Lochhead was immediate: adopting a technique developed by Helen Frankenthaler and employed by Noland, they soaked thinned acrylic paint into unsized canvas. When Greenberg organized the landmark “Post-Painterly Abstraction” show in 1964, he included work by Lochhead and McKay. Albers’ landmark publication Interactions of Color, is still being used by professors, including at the University of Manitoba’s Department of Interior Design.
Moholy-Nagy’s publications, particularly Vision in Motion (1947), and his pioneering work in New Media art affected Canadian artists such as Snow. Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage (known at the time as the “Light Space Modulator”), combined with publications by Kepes from his Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, inspired Snow, Kostyniuk and a few others to produce art focused on light and motion. Much work remains to be done in researching the full effect that Bauhaus-related publications had on Canadian artists.
