A Modern Life: Art and Design in British Columbia, 1945–1960

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery
in 2004, A Modern Life is a collection of six essays by as many authors,
introduced by the lead curator, Ian M. Thom. The first, “A Climate for
the Arts,” by R.H. Hubbard, is reprinted from Canadian Art and records
his impressions of the “creative upsurge which is making the West
Coast a new centre for the arts.” Fifty years later, Hubbard’s
assessments mostly ring true. Other essays examine the role of artists,
architects, designers, and craftspeople in the manufacture of industrial
goods and the blurring of artistic boundaries among disciplines and
media at a time when the inherent “moral propriety” of modern design
and its role in improving society was assumed. Local ceramics was
influenced by imported technology, Bernard Leach, Japan, the Bauhaus,
and the love of materials that was the focus of potters’ concerns.
Painting was dominated by the cool abstraction of B.C. Binning and the
lyricism of Jack Shadbolt, while architects’ residences featured
distinctive post-and-beam structure with floor-to-ceiling plate-glass
windows—all inspired by climate and topography. Designers experimented
with adapting wartime wood technology for the manufacture of moulded and
cut-out plywood furniture of modern design at local firms. The last
essay discusses the domestic realm (lifestyle) at mid-20th-century in
British Columbia as depicted in the influential magazine Western Homes &
Living.

Collectively, the essays persuade the reader that the institutional
influence of the Vancouver School of Art, the University of British
Columbia, and the Vancouver Art Gallery were critical to Vancouver’s
position at the forefront of modernism in Canada. The book illuminates a
vibrant period in the history of B.C. art for contemporary readers,
including those who still remember it with fond nostalgia. Many
full-page colour plates, a catalogue, and artists’ and contributors’
biographies round out this valuable contribution to our understanding of
how modernist art and design bloomed as early, and briefly, as the
daffodils in that salubrious environment a half-century ago.