Excerpt from William Perehudoff and the Tradition of Abstraction
By Alex Grimley, Ph.D.
William Perehudoff, working halfway across the North American continent in Saskatchewan, was an extreme example of painting at a distance from the fashions of New York City, though his isolation was similarly beneficial. Critic and curator Terry Fenton, commenting on the predominance of eastern Canada as the country’s cultural hub, observed that Perehudoff and his western Canadian contemporaries initially “received little recognition, [though] this may have been a blessing in disguise… for Perehudoff, whose ambition for a more enduring kind of accomplishment seems to have been confirmed as a result of his lack of recognition.”
In an improbable but catalyzing convergence, the early 1960s saw Greenberg, Noland, and Olitski each arriving in central Saskatchewan, virtually Perehudoff’s backyard, to lead the annual Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops. As art historian and curator Karen Wilkin remarked, “In a sense, the mainstream came to Perehudoff.” Established in the mid-1950s under the auspices of the University of Saskatchewan, the annual event attracted artists from around western Canada. In its early years, Fenton notes, Workshop leaders were selected “on the basis of their
first-hand knowledge of contemporary art” with the goal of encouraging attendees to “discover originality in themselves in relation to the art of their own time.” Perehudoff and his wife, the landscape painter Dorothy Knowles, who owned a cottage on Emma Lake, attended their first workshop, led by Will Barnet, in 1957 and returned again in 1961 for Herman Cherry’s session. Throughout this period, Perehudoff worked on watercolor landscapes while also exploring a variety of approaches to abstraction. In quick succession, Greenberg’s 1962 workshop was followed by 1963 exhibition, Three New American Painters: Louis, Noland, Olitski, he organized for the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina early in 1963, followed that summer by Noland’s Emma Lake workshop and Olitski’s in 1964. Together these events served to dissolve the distance between New York’s international art scene and that of the Canadian Prairie.
