Painters Eleven

Painters Eleven (variant names Painters 11 or P11) was a collective of abstract artists active in Canada from 1953 to 1960.

History

Since the 1920s, artists in English Canada had been heavily influenced by the landscape painting of the Group of Seven, the Canadian Group of Painters and the Eastern 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, which began having exhibitions as early as 1941. However, their artistic influence was not quickly felt in English Canada, or indeed much beyond Montreal.

Formation