signed & dated
Maxwell Bates is Canada’s expressionist painter. Often accused by critics of being depressing, Bates responds in a 1972 interview with Terry Guernsey: “I don’t think it (my art) is as depressing as some critics say…I don’t feel that I’m criticizing society at all. If I do, it just happens, quite by accident, as a by-product – it’s not an intentional thing.” (p.20, “Maxwell Bates in Retrospect, 1921-1971”; Vancouver Art Gallery, 1973).
On the effect of his experiences during WWII on his art, Bates comments:
I don’t think it (the experience of being a POW had any effect on my art except to intensify it when I got out, because I had been thinking so much about it all the time. Some of my ideas may have clarified a little bit. I knew I wanted to do things simply and intensely and as directly as possible, and I’ve never changed from that idea. (ibid., p. 13)
On page 100 of “Alberta Society of Artists: The First Seventy Years” (Zimon: Alberta Society of Artists, 2000) Kathy Zimon writes:
Bates had spent 1949 studying with the German expressionist Max Beckmann in New York, and his figurative work is often reminiscent of the rather stark and unsentimental view of mankind characteristic of that movement. The brilliant, contrasting colours, applied in almost primitive fashion, without depth, enhance the harshness of the features and the awkward proportions of the figure, whose aggressive deformity defies the viewer’s compassion. But ultimately, as Bates put it, the subject is relatively incidental: “I am more taken up by painting than by the subject I paint.”
Additional reference: “Maxwell Bates: Canada’s Premier Expressionist of the 20th Century” (Townsend: Snyder Hedlin Fine Arts, 2005)
