Locating Alexandra

Paul Hjartarson is an associate professor of English at the University
of Alberta.

Alexandra Luke was a member of the Painters Eleven, a group of artists
who banded together in 1953 to exhibit abstract art in Toronto. Margaret
Rodgers acknowledges that Luke’s art “has been largely forgotten,”
but in this biography does not adequately introduce readers either to
the painter or to the place that her work occupies in the context of
Canadian art in that period. She argues that Luke has been marginalized
because she was a woman working in a male-dominated art form, but fails
to evaluate the painter in relation to other female artists of the day,
such as Hortense Gordon, Joyce Wieland, and Isabel McLaughlin. Her
analysis of Luke’s paintings is undermined, in part, by the poor
quality of the reproductions in this volume (only the cover painting is
in color). Finally, her feminist analysis ignores class. The well-born
Luke, who married into Oshawa’s prominent industrialist McLaughlin
family, was one of the few members of the Painters Eleven who did not
need to engage in commercial work in order to earn a living. These
factors heavily influenced her placement among Canadian artists at
mid-century and should enter into any analysis of her artwork.