Painters Eleven

Painters Eleven (also known as Painters 11) was a group of abstract artists active in Canada between 1953 and 1960. They are associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Since the 1920s, artists in English Canada had been heavily influenced by the landscape painting of the Group of Seven, and starting in 1930s, the Canadian Group of Painters. The Canadian public often regarded modernist movements such as Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism as bizarre and subversive. The acquisition of modernist paintings, even Impressionist works, by public galleries was invariably a source of controversy.

In Quebec, Paul-Émile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle spearheaded the modernist collective known as Les Automatistes, as early as 1941. However, their artistic influence was not quickly felt in English Canada, or indeed much beyond Montreal.

Painters Eleven was the first abstract painting group in Ontario.

In 1953, Toronto artists Oscar Cahén, Walter Yarwood, and Harold Town discussed the possibility of mounting a group show of abstract paintings to strengthen public appreciation of the contemporary art. A few weeks later, William Ronald assembled seven abstract painters from Ontario, his acquaintances from previous exhibitions, to participate in a display at Simpson's in Toronto where he worked as a commercial artist, of store windows juxtaposing modern Danish and reproduction French Provincial furniture with abstract and nonobjective painting. The seven artists brought together included Jack Bush, Oscar Cahén, Tom Hodgson, Alexandra Luke, Ray Mead, Kazuo Nakamura, and William Ronald.

The show was titled Abstracts at Home and a photographer named Everett Roseborough took a photograph of the seven to advertise the event that October. During the publicity photo shoot for the exhibition, Cahén proposed the group show idea, and a subsequent meeting at Alexandra Luke's cottage in Oshawa led to the inclusion of four other friends and acquaintances - Hortense Gordon, Jock Macdonald, Harold Town and Walter Yarwood. The number totalled 11.

Town dubbed them Painters Eleven. As he said: 'Let's not go any further - we don't want to be a joke."

Painters Eleven held their first exhibition at Roberts Gallery in Toronto in 1954. The exhibition, arranged by Jack Bush, was the first major commercial exhibition of nonobjective art in Toronto.