Painting Place

This long-awaited study, lavishly illustrated, tells the remarkable story of the work of one of Canada's great artists. David Milne (1882-1953) left rural Ontario for New York City in 1903. After training at the Art Students' League, he emerged as an exceptional modernist, one of the 'American extremists,' whose work was well-represented at the famous 1913 Armory Show and won a major prize at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. Milne's studio at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue was a regular forum for artists to debate art and aesthetics. In 1916 Milne moved to Boston Corners, in upstate New York, devoting his whole time to painting. As he wandered over the years to the deserted battlefields of France and Belgium, to the Adirondacks, then back to Canada - Temagami, Palgrave, Muskoka, Toronto, Uxbridge, and Baptiste Lake - his work continued to evolve and change. Critics and other artists hailed him as one of the most original, intelligent, and innovative of artists in Canada. His work is in the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and public galleries in Canada. Silcox's biography, based on many years of research for the Milne Catalogue Raisonné, is, in the words of one of our readers, 'a near-perfect dialectic between biography and aesthetic analysis.' It will stand both as a definitive study of Milne and as a model for future biographies of Canadian artists. This gorgeous book, in a large format with 190 images in colour and 240 black and white illustrations throughout (many published for the first time), will astonish and delight all those interested in art history, and in the life of a unique individual.

DAVID P. SILCOX is an art historian and arts administrator, who has written extensively on the visual arts, including for books on Tom Thomson, Christopher Pratt, and Jack Bush, and for many catalogues and periodicals.