IAIN BAXTER (short biography)
Artist Iain Baxter recalled that Bates "as a young artist showed me by his example how to have courage about your convictions, and to be questioning society's attitudes, and to have courage and strength of purpose. He was the key person in my development, and I see now how he was a kind of Zen master - one who imparted truths and encouragement through his statements and action."
- Iain Baxter in a communication to Nancy Townshend, Nov. 6, 2000.
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FERDINAND ECKHARDT (short biography)
Among Canadian painters, Maxwell Bates occupies a rather unique position.
In the midst of the whirling winds of ever-changing trends, forcing even quite aged artists to re-adapt their concept and create more exciting forms and invent splashy effects, he is one of the few who has kept his individuality over the years. Even in the earlier years of his career, his goal, unlike that of most of his Canadian colleagues, has not so much been the esthetic French way of painting but rather the abrupt Germanic interpretation of life.
If he had idols they would not have been Cezanne, Matisse, the Cubists, Picasso, Braque (although he has occasionally let himself be influence by one or the other of them); but rather the German Expressionists - people like Beckmann, or the Belgians Ensor and Permeke.
Subject of his paintings is less landscape and still life but more the human figure in all its excitements and distortions - singly or in groups - rhythmically or better unconcerned - scattered over the background. The result is harsh and dissonant, seemingly non-esthetic at first glance, stirring, provoking and disturbing. His pictures are colourful, and he is always true to himself. He likes to speak out rather than to be euphemistic. He is critical and sarcastic. However, his painting is not only painting for the eye. It shakes the structure of society and our ideals. He has a good sense for the essentials, for things which are beneath the skin, behind the human face, and behind the human behaviour...
After some recent illness and his recovery he has become more active than ever before. His colour is bursting with vitality, the form shaken like by an earthquake and he attacks and hits with a biting wit. Very often his subjects and figures are macabre...
- Ferdinand Eckhardt, "Maxwell Bates", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1968.
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TED GODWIN (short biography)
There was one who was always above the others and that was Max Bates.
To my friends and I he was Mr. Bates (the distinguished Artist).
- Ted Godwin, "Travelling with Max", 2, Ted Godwin, (unpublished memoirs). Godwin first knew of Bates as a young teenager at the Coste House, Calgary’s post-war arts centre.
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COLIN GRAHAM (short biography)
1
Max to me has always epitomized the uncompromising nature of the prairie environment.
- Colin Graham, excerpt from the script for Janice Starko's film "Maxwell Bates: Life Work", p. 39.
2
An expressionist who is also a formalist is a relative rarity in painting, yet the description fits Maxwell Bates...The solid organization of his canvasses is at least as strong as the emotion conveyed.
Bates' feelings are conveyed with no punches pulled...
...Bates was, in fact, a pioneer Canadian modernist and rather enjoyed being roundly abused in Calgary in 1928 for his abstract paintings.
Yet much as foreign influences have enriched his understanding of form, the essential Bates has been visible from the beginning. A painting which he did in 1929 at the age of twenty-three, The Family With Pears already included all the basic elements of his style and outlook: the strong sense of pattern, the idiosyncratic fascination with striped forms, the highly expressive contours, the flair for creating memorable and somehow violently emotive human figures, and the sensuous enjoyment of oil as a medium.
Observing the harsh distortion of facial features and the sometimes apparently cruel caricature that make many of the figure paintings unforgettable, even shrewd observers have sometimes come to the mistaken conclusion that Bates is a cynical, world-disgusted misanthrope pouring out with rage his reactions to the nature and predicament of man.
...Yet...there is no more generous-minded artist in Canada, nor one whose gruff exterior conceals a warmer heart. Anyone who serves with him on a jury soon finds him generous to a fault, especially if the artist judged is young and sincere.
Some critics and most of the major artists of western and central Canada have long been aware that he is one of our country's most under-appreciated painters...
In terms of both form and content his work has a richness, density, and originality that permits us, from the perspective of the Seventies, to be sure that the best of his paintings will stand the test of time as major and permanently relevant contributions to art in Canada.
This is not to say that Bates is sentimental. He has a perceptive wit that comes out with devastating effect in works such as his Grand Hotel series...
In spite of a stroke which left him partially paralyzed in 1961, he has overcome his physical handicaps with an indomitable will, and the fifteen years that have elapsed since then have been richly productive ones.
- Colin Graham, "Maxwell Bates", Arts West (vol. 1, #4) 1976.
3
During the past six years (1960-66) the painting of Maxwell Bates has reached a richly expressive maturity toward which three decades of growth and experiment had been heading.
Now in full control of his painterly means, working easily in several form conventions, and using colour fluently both as an emotional and a decorative factor, he has been able to evolve an astonishing and haunting iconography that is entirely his own. There seems to be nothing like it in the whole range of Canadian art.
Sombre and often macabre, yet lit at times by a sardonic humour that is not without compassion, this iconography centres on the human figure, the treatment of which places Bates securely in the expressionist traditions of the twentieth century.
From dark visions of the human condition he turns from time to time to the pleasures of landscape and the still life. Sometimes he puzzled critics with hard-edge compositions of cubist derivations. But these are natural enough in a painter who in the 1930s was a pioneer Canadian cubist, who spent much of his professional life wielding an architect's ruler, and who looks upon such excursions as both a relief and a discipline after the emotional bias of his expressionist work.
The remarkable achievements of these six or so years have scarcely been seen in the rest of Canada. For this reason The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria has chosen to organize as one of its 1966 centenary projects a retrospective exhibition stressing this period which will subsequently travel to other Canadian centres.
- Colin Graham, "Maxwell Bates" (Victoria: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1966).
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ILLINGWORTH KERR (short biography)
1
The person who helped me more than anyone just to find myself perhaps was Max Bates...we used to be very critical of our work and sharing attitudes. Max was a very powerful force in Alberta. The young people respected him as well as the rest of us.
- Illingworth Kerr, Interview by Anne Nash, August 1985; Transcript, pp. 8-9; ASA Oral Histories
2
In Alberta we regard Maxwell Bates as dean of our modern painters. He is the first of our Canadian-born artists to attain national stature. He is the first to be unaffected by regionalism in a picturesque environment which dictated the direction of other pioneer artists.
...Though he denies social comment as his intent, Bates is an iconoclast. He has been a breaker of images for laymen and art students in varying degree. The young painters do not imitate him; they follow his example. His contemporaries have shared a rich friendship. We miss him.
- Illingworth Kerr, Enclosure in letter to Terry Guernsey, Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1973; Maxwell Bates in Retrospect, 1921-1971
3
The career of Maxwell Bates, painter, lithographer, architect and writer, is marked both by the high order of his creative accomplishment and the powerful influence he has exerted in the Canadian art field, particularly in the West...
...Despite a deep respect for traditional forms he was ever an iconoclast with regard to the academic and his evolution as a painter was unorthodox.
...His intensity and the wide range of his investigations commanded immediate respect: his contemporaries have always confessed a sense of indebtedness to him.
...Through periodicals, reproductions, and travel (to New York and later to Europe) Maxwell Bates was always well informed and, though not in the common sense a leader and an organizer, he exerted a powerful influence...He became the dean of modern art in Alberta.
...Maxwell Bates constantly explores for new technical means to arrest the eye and at times he has used various degrees of abstraction, including non-objective. Yet he insists on a sense of content, a message, and he is dominantly a figurative painter. His color is almost invariably rich, enhanced with texture, mysterious, individual, poetic. His subjects are enormous in range - landscapes, cityscapes, figures, still lifes - with overtones of surrealism, bitter social comment, fantasy or compassion that are always 'pure Bates' - a vision screened through his powerful imagination.
- Illingworth Kerr, Excerpts from The University of Calgary Honorary Degree Nomination, Supporting Statement for Maxwell Bates, November 28, 1967
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RUSSELL KEZIERE (short biography)
...[H]e was one of the most frequently exhibited Canadian artists in London during the '30s...
...Bates shall be remembered as a premiere Canadian figurist...Bates' figures are strangely anachronistic. They feel as if they had walked out of the pages of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Diary from which the screenplay for Cabaret was derived. The men wear pin striped vests, moustaches and bowler hats. One is reminded of Bates' teacher in New York, Max Beckman, as well as of the more pessimistic George Grosz. Bates' figures in that show were missing hands, arms and faces. Human beings were portrayed as mannequins, without presence and without power. At least that is the immediate impression. But below the surfaces, below the sketches of men with eyeglass which white out their eyes, is a sense that existence is good, albeit problematic.
It is, I think, these portraits and figures which I will remember most about Max Bates, the circus figures, self-portraits, social parodies, the touching but unstinting ink drawings of life in a prisoner of war camp. He was one of Canada's finest figurative painters, with a vision as personal as any we have had.
...But Max Bates made his best art here [in Western Canada]. And of that we can be proud.
- Russell Keziere, a commentary in memoriam of the Victoria artist Maxwell Bates on his death in Victoria in 1980. CBC REVIEW, 26.10.80 transcript.
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ROY KIYOOKA (short biography) 1
"Max Bates was the one outside of the school that I looked up to as an artist. He was certainly one of the prime mentors."
- Roy Kiyooka in an interview with Chris Varley, Roy K. Kiyooka: 25 Years, (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1975), p.4.
2
"Bates was a man with an amazing amount of will, prodigious will, that's what he had...." (with reference to Bates's recovery just after his first stroke in 1961 but also true of him throughout his life)
- excerpt from script of Janice Starko's film Maxwell Bates: Life Work, p. 52.
3
Bates "spoke to them as equals and on a very human level," recalled Roy Kiyooka. - Kay Snow, "Maxwell Bates: Biography of an Artist", p.61
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PAUL A. KYLE (short biography)
On occasion an artist emerges having a powerful effect on a great many people. Maxwell Bates was such an artist. His impact was specially felt by other artists, and not necessarily working even closely to his own chosen style; artists such as Roy Kiyooka, Michael Morris, and Joseph Kyle, all of whom have become known for their pure abstract, often minimalist paintings. Other artists affected deeply by Max Bates include John Snow, Myfanwy Pavelic, Jack Shadbolt, Eric Metcalfe, Ronald Bloore, and Gordon Smith, to name just a few of a numerous list.
To know Max was to witness directness and honesty, two qualities prevalent in every piece of Max's I have ever seen. He possessed the ability of reaching in and grabbing the very essence of our emotional centre often forcing the viewer to confront a part of themselves which can, on occasion, be quite disturbing. Max was not known for painting pretty pictures, but the vision portrayed in his works contain a profound beauty. Max was concerned with the human condition, cutting right through pomp and superfluity, leaving the viewer with a sense of vulnerability by being reminded of our human qualities that we may feel weaken us but in actuality can be our greatest source of strength.
I feel truly privileged to have known Max in his last years and to have enjoyed a wonderful friendship with him. Like so many others, he touched me deeply when he was alive and continues to do so through the highly important body of work he left us with.
- Paul Kyle, "Curator's Statement", Victoria College of Art Gallery, Nov. 15 - Dec. 15, 1992.
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JOAN LOWNDES (short biography)
1
...Bates...is one of the most European and literary of our artists, a painter of people and the human condition...he entertains the lofty ambition of commenting on man's fate, which he symbolizes in puppets, clowns, scarecrows, crucifixions and beggar kings.
They are steeped in memories of the European tradition. The circus people, for example, evoke Daumier, Degas, Seurat and early Picasso, while the crucifixions, with their deeply-gashed black lines, remind us of the recent show here of German Expressionist graphics.
Yet, from all of this, because of the intensity of his feeling and his talent, Bates has composed a personal amalgam of extraordinary complexity and power...
As it is, he stands out as a unique figure on the Canadian scene whose value is not only confirmed but immeasurably enhanced by this dense survey.
...there is continuity in Bates' development...Bates said: 'I don't think I've changed my vision essentially since 1930, before I went to England.'
His tragic themes of puppets, scarecrows, and crucifixions were all broached before his stroke, as were his savagely sardonic portrayals of people standing around at cocktail parties.
But after 1961 all this is intensified...
Bates' images, moreover, blend to enrich their connotations. Guests at a reception become puppets, dangling stiffly in a line confronting the viewer...
He can indulge in fanciful memories of a trip taken with his parents when he was a small boy to the Grand Hotels of Europe. This series of 25 monoprints gives wonderful scope for his unquenchable delight in pattern: Lozenges, stripes, the intricacies of impressed plastic lace doilies, the Art Nouveau sinuosities of potted plants and Corinthian columns - all forming a matted background from which figures and faces gradually emerge.
It is not easy to take the measure of Max Bates...
- Joan Lowndes, "Maxwell Bates collection steeped in memories of European tradition", Vancouver Sun, 19 January 1973.
2
...Bates' tragic themes were mostly broached before his stroke. He has always taken a somber view of existence.
...There is throughout an unremitting intensity and a mastery of every medium: lithography, monoprint, watercolour, oil.
...His main concern is the fate of man. He is in that sense one of the most European of our artists...
...His work is steeped in the European tradition. His card players inevitably recall Cézanne, his circus people early Picasso, his crucifixions with their heavy black outlines the deeply gouged woodcuts of the German Expressionists and Rouault - although they may stem more simply from a game he played as a child, putting together bits of colored glass and china to make patterns.
Certainly Bates' most ambitious painting aims to create a metaphor for the human condition. If he could find one as original as Bacon's versions of Velasquez' Pope Innocent X crying out in torture, or Weiss' Marat-Sade, or Beckett's End Game - he is an admirer of Beckett - he would rise to world renown. His puppets, clowns, scarecrows and crucifixions are classic symbols, although admittedly recharged with fierce emotion. His Christ hanging on the cross is one of his many self-portraits. His Puppet Clowns cling together conspirationally, as though muttering protests against their puppeteer. A startled scarecrow watches, impotent, while a rout of hoydens - smashed raspberry mouths, flushed scarlet flesh, skirts hoisted above their crotch - cavort about as though maddened with aphrodisiac.
He begins to construct his own mythology. He unites opposites in his beggar kings, dressed in gay tatters and wearing crowns like paper hats at New Year's parties. He satirizes the cocktail party, making it into an allegory of contemporary alienation. No conversation, just puppet people dangling stiffly in a line across the canvas, each clutching a glass of opiate, sheathed in silence. In Night of Nepenthe two women present bared breasts burnished and studded like shields. Everywhere a raw female aggressiveness born of boredom and despair. It seems to me that this transformation of an ordinary social convention is one of Bates' most powerful and hallucinatory statements.
Other overlappings of imagery lead him from the crucifixion into the graveyard, through which parade his clowns and crippled kings. And thence to the danse macabre of the Duchess of Aquitaine, where the plants also read as crosses and the skeletons as heralds.
These visions well from a deep substratum of pessimism...
His tour de force in decorative invention and sustained fantasy is the Secrets of the Grand Hotel, a series of 25 monoprints made in 1964-65. They are based on memories, both real and imagined, of a trip he took to England with his parents when he was a small boy. He has assembled a marvellous cast of supercilious desk clerks, elderly roues, tarts, Russian generals on leave, an actress from Paris, a maharajah and his entourage, to mention only the leads. He half conceals in a lush undergrowth of potted plants, Ionic and Corinthian columns, S scrolls and lacy patterns reminiscent of the Art Nouveau balconies and elaborate dining rooms of another era.
...Retrospectives imply a summing up but it is impossible to sum up Bates. Everything you could say about him would have an exception. What happens, in the end, is a kind of synergy whereby the total impact is greater than the sum of the very different parts.
- Joan Lowndes, "Maxwell Bates: In Retrospect 1921-1971", artscanada (vol. XXX, No. 2), May 1973, pp. 59-63.
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JOCK MACDONALD (short biography)
1
"Who ever said that your work had heaviness and brutality? This is not true. Certainly it had a severity and solidity. The severity was true, for me, to the climatic characteristics of the people in Alberta, where one would never find a classical mould nor a sliminess of forms which one would find in the humans living in a more gentle environment. I found your sensitivity and forcefulness of statement a most unique quality - exceedingly personal, decidedly art and a vital contribution for all of us to experience. Now you find a change coming. Wonderful!"
- Jock Macdonald in a letter dated July 2, 1954 to Maxwell Bates, from correspondence in the McCord Museum.
2
"Nothing would please me better than to have you write [an article on Macdonald's art in Canadian Art] - you write superbly. I value very greatly your judgment and opinions...But, something from you I would consider an honour to receive."
- Jock Macdonald in a letter dated April 15, 1956 to Maxwell Bates, from correspondence in the McCord Museum.
3
"...It is this elusiveness which qualifies the uniqueness of your work - no matter what word, or words, one might use to describe the work they would still not enclose the (something) essence of your painting. I am amazed at Kerr's remark that you can become 'even repelling'. You have far too much kindness and affection in your disposition ever to suggest the slightest evidence of being 'repelling'...I do not agree - no SIR! That is utter nonsense."
- Jock Macdonald in a letter dated July 30, 1956 to Maxwell Bates, from correspondence in the McCord Museum.
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MICHAEL MORRIS (short biography)
Maxwell Bates is one of the few artists of his generation in Western Canada to have maintained the respect and admiration of successive generations of painters. His single-mindedness and ability to grasp and understand "the moment" without allowing it to interfere with his own direction has served as an example to painters like Roy Kiyooka, Ron Bloore, Iain Baxter, and myself.
The majority of his work has yet to receive the recognition that it deserves. Maxwell Bates has never been part of any establishment: he has never taught in the formal sense or had the usual gallery affiliations. He is a man who has to be sought out and approached on his own terms.
His concerns are private, often literary and highly satirical. They deal almost totally with his own experience and condition. He is a documenter, and keeps extensive notebooks, photos and sketches which provide amazing detail and authenticity to all of his work.
There are references in Bates' work to the major trends in twentieth century painting; but it would be an oversimplification to approach his painting as expressionism or surrealism, although he spent over sixteen years in Europe, and studied with Max Beckman in New York. Maxwell Bates has absorbed these influences to create an uncompromising personal mythology.
- Michael Morris, "Maxwell Bates and Eric Metcalfe" (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1967).
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J. McL. NICOLL (short biography)
Our society has established a category to which, from time to time, it elevates some member whose work as an artist and whose contribution to the progress and well-being of the visual arts merit our official recognition and whatever distinction we may be able to confer.
For some time there has grown within our ranks a strong feeling that we should so honour one of our most highly esteemed fellow-members. Maxwell Bates, many years ago, was alert to the evolving forms and attitudes that had emerged into brilliant expression in Europe, and with commendable resolution he braved the indifference and even hostility of our pioneer and narrowly provincial community in Calgary. Following years of study and development in England, and matured in European artistic and military conflict, he returned to Calgary and, during the last two decades, has not only steadily won international recognition but has helped to fertilize the cultural area of his native city and province.
We are proud of his numerous successes in the major galleries and exhibitions of Canada and the United States. We are grateful for the help, encouragement and fruitful example he has afforded our local artists. We have been stimulated by his perceptive and analytical essays and published reviews, and we gratefully acknowledge the value of his willing labours on juries and committees to provide direction and impetus in the art movements of Calgary and the province of Alberta.
I am personally happy to represent Maxwell's many friends and admirers, in nominating him for honorary membership in the [Alberta Society of Artists].
- J.McL. Nicoll, Minutes of Annual Meeting of the Alberta Society of Artists, 26 May, 1962, Calgary, Provincial Archives of Alberta, acc. no. 77.203.
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FRANK NOWOSAD (short biography)
Although Maxwell Bates spent the last 18 years of his life in Victoria, he was essentially a prairie artist. The worn farm woman standing in a sharp, spring wind; a landscape alternating bareness with a sudden seasonal burst of color; or a still life of humble utensils and scrawny flowers; all contribute to a bleak but moving portrait of Canadian prairie life.
Even Bates' fascination for the exotic - the seedy, malevolent circus characters and the voluptuous sideshow girls that once passed through the pitiful towns - bespeak an intensity born of a prairie deprivation.
Like so many, Bates found in Victoria a hospitable climate and a quiet environment for working. And relatively speaking, Victoria respected this transplant. The number of Bates works in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, showing a retrospective until Saturday, far exceed those of Calgary's Glenbow Museum; a surprise when one realizes that Bates was born in Calgary and spent the major part of his life there.
Bates was a small, reticent man. His shaggy eyebrows and his grim countenance made him physically at one with the sinister dwarfs who frequent his paintings. He was an interviewer's nightmare, capable of flustering the most prying, ingratiating talk-show hostesses with an unyielding, solitary yes or no. He rarely spoke on his own work, implying that paintings were for looking not talking.
To other artists he was unstintingly supportive and generous. They appeared in his work as isolated figures, perhaps sitting in a tavern having a beer or standing off to one side at a cocktail party or gallery opening. The portrait studies of these kindred spirits he invariably titled Poets.
He loved the ladies. Wide-eyed, buxom, and fertile, they bloomed throughout his paintings. Also always drawn to vivid colors and bold patterns, Bates would exploit these aspects of women's fashions and fancies to a grand extreme. The glossy babes of Vogue or McCall's loomed larger and more dazzling under his hand. Sometimes the women would bulge disproportionately, becoming viragos and female chauvinists, as threatening as the mother-in-law in the old Maggie and Jiggs comic strip.
At the opening of the essay in the retrospective's catalogue Bates is quoted as saying, "I am a product of the Period of Art Nouveau, pared down by the Prairie wind."
His passions for pattern and design somewhat reinforce this self-revelation but Bates was too restless, too individual, and too harsh to be tied to such a refined, delicate style as art nouveau or, for that matter, any one style. He cut his own twisted path.
Always he kept his eye on other artists' work. The experiments with brushstroke, the eccentric uses of space, or the Rouault-like outlining of forms, told that he borrowed liberally from the past masters of Impressionism and Expressionism.
However, it was a mail-order education gleaned initially from a few art books and Studio magazines; then later supported by study in England and New York. His vision, informed by Western Art of the 20th Century, retained an idiosyncratic integrity.
A friend of mine once exclaimed to Bates, "I would love to own one of your marvelous caricatures." To this Bates bluntly replied, "What caricatures?"
His way of seeing was unconventional and it allowed him to register the world in a striking manner. With respect to this odd vision he was completely unanalytical; probably because he thought it normal.
Collections of his work, such as this retrospective, with their tilted landscapes and peculiar inhabitants induce the viewer into feeling as if he is being dropped through a fissure in conventional consciousness - that he becomes an Alice searching through a fractured Wonderland.
When there is humor, it is of the Punch and Judy variety. Beneath the shenanigans is a desperate reality. A Bates cocktail party is just another Punch and Judy show with more puppets in different costumes...
- Frank Nowosad, "The Prairie Artist Who Looked at Life Bleakly" The Vancouver Sun, Oct. 13, 1982.
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P.K. PAGE (short biography)
1
"...Anyone who has had a vision of what man could become must thereafter see him in his partial evolution as deformed. "Man, poor man, half animal, half angel." Vile only in relation to his possibilities. I believe this to be the essence of Bates' message."
- P.K. Page, "Maxwell Bates: The Print Gallery, Victoria, February-March 1970", artscanada, April 1970, 62.
2
"I think Max had a great interest in what might be described as the central mystery of life. It was manifested in many ways...I think there was a great ambivalence. I think he was curious, drawn to all the sort of magnetism of the subjects related to the mystery and yet cautious and reluctant to commit further than that."
- P.K. Page, excerpt from transcript of Janice Starko's film Maxwell Bates: Life Work, p. 48-49.
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FRANK PALMER (short biography)
"I don't think anybody will ever totally appreciate what influence Max was to the artist in Calgary...He was the man who produced talk. Prior to that there really was none."
- Frank Palmer in an interview with June Montgomery, November 30, 1987, Alberta Society of Artists Oral History Transcripts/Tapes, pp.8-9.
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MYFANWY PAVELIC (short biography)
"Maxwell Bates - our Limner leader - gave us strength and held us together."
- Myfanwy Pavelic in a communication to Nancy Townshend,
Mar. 8, 2002.
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DORIS SHADBOLT (short biography)
"It seems that few living senior artists are held in such deep and warm respect, both for the sustained contribution he has made over the years to Canadian art and for his humanity."
- Doris Shadbolt, "Maxwell Bates in Retrospect, 1921-1971" (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1973), p. 1.
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JACK SHADBOLT (short biography)
There are rare personalities among artists whose benign influence on those who have lived close to them or have come into their orbit translates itself almost into the legendary.
In the first place it has to do with their creative talents which are so convincing as to attract to them a following: but it is definitely more than that. It would seem to be a kind of total, unquestioning self-belief in the occupation of art with which they are concerned and which consumes their entire life without residue. They burn clean. In a way it is a conviction born of natural innocence however sophisticated they may appear to be.
Yet beyond that, and possibly because of it, they have a moral strength which enables them to live above adversity. Max Bates, like the late Jack Chambers, had all these qualities.
Such a simplification is, of course, presumptuous: yet the fact of the impact of such lives remains clear. The Chamber legend is now well-established; indeed his friends and admirers are establishing a foundation in his name as a contribution to the Canadian art scene. The Max Bates legend is less widely circulated because of his almost reclusive existence in out-of-centre Victoria, B.C. as a wheelchair cripple of many years. But his aura is no less tangible. To those of the Coast region, and in Alberta where he started his career in art and architecture, his name is revered and his legend emulated. He had the guts and the physical courage to keep working; so he avoided the erosion of bitterness. His vision was wry but tough-tender. He saw the world around him with no illusions but with human tolerance. He took no refuge in fantasy or magic realism. His was the realism of the compassionate satirist. His technique and vision stemmed from Max Beckman, with whom he studied and whom he admired unreservedly, but his extensions out of such a beginning were his own and unique. He had a kind of unvarnished, awkwardly angular actuality of form, never prettied up, which was yet so psychologically telling in its summarizing of the stance of a figure and the relevant revealing detail as to create astonishing authenticity. He worked from life, and life as lived; the quiet observer in a corner who missed little. He read a lot, was a fine writer of poetry, and these things also conditioned his vision. That he was a master watercolorist few would doubt - though his idiom and command of various media had a range.
I understand that his biography and work will be dealt with in due course. What is significant now, is to say that he was loved as a person for his humor and his insight and encouragement to younger artists who knew him, that all his friends were deeply anxious in the interval between his last stroke and the time of his death and they are greatly moved by his departure from our art scene. Something in our climate of art was changed by his presence. And those who knew his intimate situation will attest that his wife Charlotte is owed an enormous debt of gratitude for her steady devotion to Max which made his artistic continuance possible.
-Jack Shadbolt, "Maxwell Bates (1906-1980)", artscanada 37 (December 1980/January 1981): p. 2.
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DAVID P. SILCOX (short biography)
When Maxwell Bates died last year, Canada lost a painter, a poet and an architect of rare and, for the most part, unrecognized qualities. Until quite late in his life, only a few fellow artists acknowledged the unique value of his questing and often satirical spirit. For them he was a model, a pathfinder. In the words of one of his poems, he:
Became a vagabond
In empty spaces
Without benefit of maps,
Using the compass of the mind:
The needle of attention
Pointing always
To what I had not been told.
He was a man of strange contradictions. His paintings are peopled with beggars and kings, puppets and angels, prostitutes and farmers, clowns and saints, crucifixions and scarecrows. He was by turns both compassionate and acidic. He had seen the degradation of human dignity in the concentration camps as a prisoner of war, yet he celebrated the freedom of the human spirit, the ability of the mind to imagine and to dream. The man who designed, supervised the construction of, and did the decorations for St. Mary's Cathedral in Calgary, could also write (a caustic reminder to all of us perhaps):
If some Foundation will supply the money
He goes and sits and farts
In an International Conference of the Arts,
And talks a lot of balls
To those imprisoned in the stalls.
To talk sense is unnecessary;
Who does?
It's obscure crap that goes,
Implying how much one does for art.
Looks as if he's on his toes
At a cocktail party
Or exhibition opening.
Becomes horribly knowing
In mentioning something
That no-one has heard.
Oozing false modesty
Like a cracked sewer.
Maxwell Bates was one of Canada's pioneers, a tenacious, sophisticated man who could and did hold his own with artists in Europe, who read widely and knew much more than he sometimes pretended, who in his head brought the whole world to his home in Calgary, who wrote poetry in German, who practised as an architect for many years while continuing to paint and draw. He had great courage, not only to continue his work through many years of physical suffering and hardship, but also to speak his own mind forthrightly, to express his visions of the world. He brought learning and breadth to an often hostile community. His perseverance has been an example and a strength to younger artists.
Sometimes we are too slow to honour great men among us. That we are paying tribute to Maxwell Bates posthumously, is something he would gleefully appreciate. Yet how much better it would be if he were here to accept our homage to his life-long accomplishments. We receive consolation from the fact that his buildings, his writings and his many paintings, prints and drawings retain his lively spirit for Canada's present and future traditions. But he would want us to focus our attention on living artists, those who, like him, represent the human ability to create, to stretch the limits of knowledge and understanding, and to give grace and value to life.
- David P. Silcox, "Maxwell Bates: Diplomes d'Honneur", 1981
ROBIN SKELTON (short biography)
"...When Max approached his seventieth birthday and a big celebratory retrospective was to be held in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, some of us decided that the occasion demanded more than official formalities, and we organized a birthday party for him in my own big house in Oak Bay. Intent upon showing him our love of his work, we hung the whole ground floor with our own Maxwell Bates retrospective, borrowing the pictures from the collections of his friends, including some works which Max had done as a very young man and which he had totally forgotten. His brother Bill, P.K. Page, Herbert Siebner, Myfanwy Pavelic and Burton and Erika Kurth all lent works. Since he had, unintentionally or not, caricatured so many of us, we also decided to caricature his paintings and attended the party dressed as figures from his work, or, in some cases, figures that we felt he had omitted only by accident. Myfanwy Pavelic, whose paintings and drawings of Max portray him with such accuracy and affection, transformed herself into a party girl and her husband, Nikki, made an imposing King. Flemming Jorgensen was a clown. Elza Mayhew and Rita Morris were charladies. Herbert Siebner wore a pith helmet and a mask, and his wife, Hannelore, was an inconsistently attractive scarecrow. The rooms were filled with artists pretending to be paintings.
Max had said "No presents," but this we ignored and as he sat in his special chair, with a table to hold a glass that was never permitted to be empty, the pile of gifts around him grew. The artists gave him prints and drawings and sometimes objects which seemed appropriate to the occasion. The reigning mayor of Victoria, Peter Pollen, gave him an ostrich egg. Max, lionized at last in spite of himself, forgave us our homage because of our affection, cackled happily at the kisses of the ladies and grinned broadly at the jovial congratulations of his friends. He looked out from his chair at the brightly coloured throng of clowns, beggars, kings, and at the drawings and paintings that testified to more than fifty years of devotion and glowed with pleasure. When the party was over and the figures of his imagination were moving away into the night he thanked us in a speech of his usual length. "Thank you," said Max. "It was a good party." And again, through his muffler, as he negotiated the back step, "Thank you." The thanks were all ours. Max had enriched and enriched us, and continues to do so, and it was not a pretence that we made to be part of his paintings. We are all in his paintings, every one of us, and part of that humanity he mocked, loved and served.
- Robin Skelton, "Max at Seventy", Visual Arts Newsletter, Alberta Department of Culture and Multiculturalism, 5 (Winter 1983): p. 3.
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JOHN HAROLD THOMAS SNOW (short biography)
...Born in Calgary, Bates is an artist of international reputation based on the intellectual and spiritual vitality of his work...
...He was, I believe, the strongest continuing and most progressive cultural influence in the Community from 1946 to 1962. It was most of all by example and encouragement that he provided leadership for younger artists. Because of his contribution to the intellectual life of Alberta, he was made an honorary member of the Alberta Society of Architects; and in 1960 was elected a Fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters, Switzerland...
Maxwell Bates, a superb colorist has throughout his life consistently produced strong creative work, highly original in concept which has added considerably to the measure of Canadian artistic endeavour.
- John Snow, "Excerpts from Supporting Statement, Honorary Degree Nomination, University of Calgary",
Nov. 29, 1967
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JOHN VANCE SNOW (short biography)
The wire is sliced at last.
Dust and space, which brought
lesser spirits to their knees,
ran in his veins as hard as
1930s western grunts
when farmers got the question.
"How's the crop?"
The prophet, chronicler of Place Pigalle short fortunes,
cotton housedressed women,
survivors
beggar kings
asked for nothing,
leered at charity,
roared at tenderness
like the wind which blew
ten thousand dreams to nothing.
Beggar himself, proud as Nehemiah,
cried destruction to a world of carnivals,
sat Sibylline with the Barman,
eyes like Checkpoint Charlie searchlights,
waiting.
The man liked cocktail parties, sat in sidelines,
laid pallet traps for unwary souls,
caught innocents for self-examination,
lured social Hansels to be fattened
for his multicoloured pies.
When I was five, I thought him a goblin king,
lurking in shadows, ready to pounce.
Troll lord, when I was five.
At ten, the hunchback for his own cathedral.
The man had wire in his soul,
arteries of hatred,
a life supply of hemlock-flavored truth.
He and the Barman liked each other, sort of.
When he died, the Hansels rushed
to pluck the painted candies from his house,
forgetting the stone centres,
inlaid with mirrors.
The Barman poured out the old man's
last straight-up drink
and didn't forget the barbed wire swizzle stick
either.
- John Vance Snow, "In Memoriam: Maxwell Bates
1906-1980", The Malahat Review 62 (July 1982) 202-03
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RONALD GYO-ZO SPICKETT (short biography)
1
"Max was the first adult male outside of Jock Macdonald who took art seriously to the proper level."
- Ron Spickett in an interview with Nancy Townshend, Dec. 1996, 1.
2
"The larger route of Life itself was the larger insight that allied Max to others. He was touched and we were touched by him."
- Ron Spickett as quoted by Kay Snow, "Maxwell Bates: Biography of an Artist", p. 124
3
Max in passing.
I have always viewed Art as a spiritual exercise.
It is not, in that sense, special, in that spiritual exercises are living art.
The making of a work of art is gestural evidence of this and Max Bates knew it well.
To move through the world with knowing is the effort of the artist. Not simply the making of art forms.
Max knew this and moved with knowing grace even when the movement was accompanied by pain.
The keen interest Max had for ideas, for the search and for the process took him closer to friends than would mere affinity to vocation.
In the early years of 'Art in Calgary' (40s 50s) Max offered not only the basis of friendship but also creative affirmation to a new crop of gropers.
To some, like myself, Art was simply a Way.
A route to insight.
The larger route of Life itself was the larger insight that allied Max to others.
He was touched and we were touched by him.
August 1989
- Ron Spickett, cited in "Maxwell Bates: Biography of an Artist", Kathleen M. Snow, (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1993), p. 124. Based on letter from Spickett to Kathleen M. Snow, 10 May, 1989.
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IAN THOM (short biography)
"Most of us don't look as thoroughly, as well, or as insightfully as Max Bates does. He teaches us an extraordinary lesson in this quality of "looking" that is there in all of his work, and I think that will always remain one of his most important legacies...Bates viewed life, viewed art, with an extraordinary intensity, and it's that intensity which is one of the chief glories, I think, of his art."
- Ian Thom, excerpt from the script of Janice Starko's film Maxwell Bates: Life Work, p. 55-56.
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NANCY TOWNSHEND (short biography)
This virtual exhibition is about Calgary's true culture, reflects her important 20th century artistic tradition and inherently expresses her core values.
Max was born here in 1906. Calgary helped create him until 1931 when he left for London, England. There he put Calgary on the artistic map and again, from 1946 to 1961, when Max later lived here.
However, for a variety of important reasons Calgary's identification with Maxwell Bates almost got lost.
This virtual exhibition is pleased to include 6 works from the Glenbow Museum (especially Prairie Woman 1947 donated by old Calgarian Mrs. F.G. Garbutt over a half century ago) and 1 work from the National Gallery of Canada.
In contrast the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria collected 96 of your works - Max, you lived in Victoria from 1961 to 1980 and were the unofficial leader of the Limners - including masterpieces Kindergarten 1965 and Odalisque 1970. The Vancouver Art Gallery was close behind collecting 59 artworks including your witty literary series The Secrets of the Grand Hotel. If the National Gallery extended its program of use and investigation of the National Gallery's archives and collections to the Maxwell Bates fonds, Special Collections, University of Calgary Library and to these galleries, then you, Max, and your art could be researched and studied and shows about your art could be curated.
In addition old Calgarians have struggled to maintain our identity, our beliefs and our practices in the face of relentless change. This true story almost got lost because of: post-modernism, structuralism, ethnicity, gender identity and feminism emphasized at the post-secondary teaching level and in public art galleries since about 1985. Max, you did not fit well into these categories.
You were Calgary through and through. I understood you and your art. This great city of culture, Calgary, and the great artist Maxwell Bates are synonymous!
To tell this story more public education about your accomplishments, Max, is required. Ian Thom's Retrospective in 1982 and my Landscape show of the same year started turning the tide. We learned a great deal about you in Kathleen M. Snow's "Maxwell Bates: Biography of an Artist" (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1993).
Maybe you, dear Internet, in your power to facilitate worldwide democratization of the arts and dissemination of information in English and French, can make a difference! And Calgary's true 20th century modern art culture - notably Max's creations for humanity - will be preserved and will survive!
- Nancy Townshend, "In Exaltation of Calgary, Maxwell Bates, and the Internet", 2003
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LUCY WERTHEIM (short biography)
"Your work gave me great pleasure."
- Lucy Wertheim, in a letter dated May 31, 1959 to Maxwell Bates, Maxwell Bates fonds, Special Collections, fonds #439/89.1, file #22.2, University of Calgary Library.
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MONCRIEFF WILLIAMSON (short biography)
"I think, perhaps, that this hidden communication is a quality which underlies the majority of prints and paintings by Maxwell Bates and which is why he has climbed to an almost incontestable position from a critic's viewpoint...Mr. Bates is himself a very complicated and dynamic personality. Poet, visionary, painter, lithographer and finally, an accomplished writer and architect. In his complicated way undoubtedly he is one of the most prominent and significant of living Canadians..."
- Moncrieff Williamson, "Wide range, complex talents characterize Maxwell Bates", Victoria Daily Times, 23 November 1963 (review of Bates's two shows at Ego Interiors).
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