The few survey textbooks on Canadian art are, for the most part, out of date, out of print and meagrely illustrated. One of my colleagues bemoans the fact that Ralph Greenhill and Andrew Birrell’s Canadian Photography, 1839–1920, published in 1979, is still the one and only text on the history of photography in Canada (currently out of print in both the original and revised editions) as often as she is given the opportunity to do so. This history needs to be written, she insists. And I want to agree.
Ever since Giorgio Vasari chronicled The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects in the 1550s, the history of art, singular, masculine, European and, including, of course, only “the most excellent,” has been shaped by the telling and retelling of the magical story of who begat whom and which ism heralded the next. It is different now, no doubt, in the age of all things plural, all things post- and all terms negatively...
Georgiana Uhlyarik is assistant curator of Canadian art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her recent projects include Betty Goodwin: Work Notes and The Passion of Kathleen Munn. Originally from Romania, she lives in Toronto with her twin sons.
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