David Milne: Watercolours

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

David Milne (1882–1953), long respected as one of Canada’s major
artists and recently celebrated at the British Museum and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is finally receiving the
attention his work deserves in this lavish book by Katharine Locknan,
Carol Troyen, Rosemarie L. Tovell, Dennis Reid, John O’Brian, and
David P. Silcox.

Born in Burgoyne, Ontario, Milne spent much of his early career in New
York City, travelled in Europe during World War I, settled in upstate
New York, then returned to Ontario in his final years. Each period of
his life led to changes in his subject matter and painting style.

Lochnan (senior curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario) contributes two
essays on Milne’s “gentle tokens of modernity,” which he produced
in New York City. She credits his unorthodox painting method of using
first dry and then wet paint on wove paper with creating an “entirely
original” surface of magical richness. Troyen (a curator of paintings
in the Art of the Americas Department of the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston) focuses on the decisiveness, strength, and brilliant colouring
of Milne’s postwar work. Tovell (curator of Canadian Prints and
Drawings at the National Gallery of Canada) addresses changes in his
wartime watercolours. Reid (chief curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario)
discusses how Milne added red and mocha to his postwar palette, while
continuing to favour black. O’Brian (a professor of art history at the
University of British Columbia) describes a kind of “second-generation
Abstract Expressionism covering common street scenes, parks, ponds, even
jam jars” in Milne’s work, all conveyed with “fierce economy of
execution.” David P. Silcox (managing director of Sotheby’s Canada
and the author of David Milne: An Introduction to His Life and Art,
David B. Milne: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, and Painting
Place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne) considers Milne’s work
from a Canadian perspective.

By combining the views of six art critics along with a wealth of
illustrations of Milne’s work (84 full-colour and 50 black-and-white
images), this large, handsome book conveys a complex yet balanced
portrait of Milne.