Contemporary Arts Society

The Contemporary Arts Society was founded in Montreal in 1939 by painter John Lyman to promote modern art in a Canadian art world still dominated by academic taste. Lyman served as its first president, with Paul-Émile Borduas as vice-president, Fritz Brandtner as secretary, and Philip Surrey as treasurer. Over its decade of activity the society grew to some sixty members - artists, collectors, and critics - and gave Montreal audiences a sustained look at post-impressionist, fauvist, and emerging abstract work. It deliberately welcomed disagreement rather than enforcing a house style: realists, landscapists, and abstractionists exhibited side by side. The society dissolved in 1948, but it formed the bridge between interwar Canadian modernism and the Automatiste revolt that Borduas launched the same year with the Refus Global manifesto.

Defining characteristics

• Post-Impressionist and Fauvist color: expressive, non-naturalistic palettes
• Loose, visible brushwork and simplified form over academic finish
• Everyday Canadian subjects - Montreal streets, rural Quebec, portraiture - treated in modernist terms
• A deliberate mix of representational modernism and abstraction within one exhibiting body

Key figures

• John Lyman (1886-1967) — Founded the society and served as its first president; painter of Fauvist-influenced figures and landscapes
• Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960) — Vice-president, later leader of the Automatistes and author of the Refus Global manifesto
• Alfred Pellan (1906-1988) — Member and leading Montreal modernist painter
• Goodridge Roberts (1904-1974) — Member known for lyrical landscape and figure painting

Sources

• Contemporary Arts Society - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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