Marian Dale Scott,
Portrait of Lois Gordon in a Russian Dress, 1935
Marian Dale Scott (1906–1993) was a pioneering modernist and is well recognized as an important figure in twentieth-century art in Canada. In the 1920s, Dale Scott attended the École des beaux-arts de Montréal and later the Slade School of Fine Art in London, UK. By the 1930s, she had developed a bold painting style to depict the urban and natural environments around Montreal. She later gained attention for her highly modernist studies of plants, minimalist paintings of the city’s unique exterior stairways, biomorphic abstractions, and later fully abstract works. She was a member of the Canadian Group of Painters and was closely affiliated with her fellow artist Pegi Nicol MacLeod.
Portrait of Lois Gordon in a Russian Dress, 1935, is a singular work in Dale Scott’s career. It is a precise portrait accentuated by an expressive study of a rubber tree. The subject, Lois Gordon, was a close friend of the artist’s and the sister of John King Gordon, a comrade of Norman Bethune’s and a member of the leftist circle that Dale Scott and her husband, the poet and constitutional scholar Frank Scott, ran in. In the portrait Gordon wears a garment that her brother had bought for her during a trip to the Soviet Union. She appears lost in thought, looking off to the side. In her admirably thorough study of Dale Scott, the Montreal art historian Esther Trépanier reveals that Gordon, a librarian, agreed to pose for the portrait only if she could read during the sittings, perhaps explaining her somewhat preoccupied stare. Following its completion, the portrait was exhibited internationally across the Southern Hemisphere in exhibitions in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaii.
This work can be seen in the McMichael’s exhibition catalogue Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment.
Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment
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