The Biographical Dictionary of Saskatchewan Artists: Men Artists

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This useful reference tool for Western Canadian art history—a
companion volume to an earlier one devoted to Saskatchewan women artists
(1990)—covers all male Saskatchewan painters, sculptors, and
printmakers born between 1872 and 1950 who are deemed to have played a
significant role in Saskatchewan art. There are 188 entries arranged
alphabetically. Newman provides biographical data, including exhibition
lists, and information on the media used by each artist. There are no
images, save for the cover photograph of Vincent, a multimedia sculpture
by Joe Fafard.

In the foreword, Matthew Teitelbaum notes that Newman’s dictionary
reveals “the shared histories of artists who exhibited and sketched
together, of artists who studied with the same teachers years apart, of
those who shared the sense of a geography of splendour.” Canada needs
similar reference tools for artists in other provinces. The two-volume
separation by gender encourages other avenues of speculation.