From the Roaring Twenties and the Group of Seven to the Automatistes and the early Cold War, Canadian artists lived through and embodied an era of global tumult and change. With an interweaving of historical narrative, lavish illustrations, and writings by many of Canada's most revered cultural figures, Lora Senechal Carney illuminates the lives, perspectives, and works of the era's painters and provides glimpses of the sculptors, poets, dancers, critics, and filmmakers with whom they associated. Canadian Painters in a Modern World gives readers direct access to a carefully curated selection of writings, artworks, photos, and other documents that help to reconstruct the public spheres in which artists including Paul-Emile Borduas, Emily Carr, Alex Colville, Lawren Harris, David Milne, and Pegi Nicol MacLeod circulated. Each of the book's eight chapters consists of a narrative about a key issue or debate, focusing on the relationship of art to politics and society, and on how these are negotiated in an individual's life. Relating artistic engagement with and responses to the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, Senechal Carney discovers a common desire for new connections between art and life. Revealing continuities, ruptures, and watershed moments, Canadian Painters in a Modern World showcases artistic production within specific socio-political contexts to shed new light on Canadian art during three decades of conflict and crisis.

Canadian readers have enjoyed their own graphic satire since colonial times and Canadian artists have thrived as they took aim at the central issues and figures of their age. Graphic satire, a combination of humorous drawing and text that usually involves caricature, is a way of taking an ethical stand about contemporary politics and society. First appearing in short-lived illustrated weeklies in Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto in the 1840s, usually as unsigned copies of engravings from European magazines, the genre spread quickly as skilled local illustrators, engravers, painters, and sculptors joined the teams of publishers and writers who sought to shape public opinion and public policy. A detailed account of Canadian graphic satire, Sketches from an Unquiet Country looks at a century bookended by the aftermath of the 1837-38 Rebellions and Canada's entry into the Second World War. As fully fledged artist-commentators, Canadian cartoonists were sometimes gently ironic, but they were just as often caustic and violent in the pursuit of a point of view. This volume shows a country where conflicts crop up between linguistic and religious communities, a country often resistant to social and political change for women and open to the cross-currents of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and fascism that flared across Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. Drawing on new scholarship by researchers working in art history, material culture, and communication studies, Sketches from an Unquiet Country follows the fortunes of some of the artists and satiric themes that were prevalent in the centres of Canadian publishing.

Canadian readers have enjoyed their own graphic satire since colonial times and Canadian artists have thrived as they took aim at the central issues and figures of their age. Graphic satire, a combination of humorous drawing and text that usually involves caricature, is a way of taking an ethical stand about contemporary politics and society. First appearing in short-lived illustrated weeklies in Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto in the 1840s, usually as unsigned copies of engravings from European magazines, the genre spread quickly as skilled local illustrators, engravers, painters, and sculptors joined the teams of publishers and writers who sought to shape public opinion and public policy. A detailed account of Canadian graphic satire, Sketches from an Unquiet Country looks at a century bookended by the aftermath of the 1837-38 Rebellions and Canada's entry into the Second World War. As fully fledged artist-commentators, Canadian cartoonists were sometimes gently ironic, but they were just as often caustic and violent in the pursuit of a point of view. This volume shows a country where conflicts crop up between linguistic and religious communities, a country often resistant to social and political change for women and open to the cross-currents of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and fascism that flared across Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. Drawing on new scholarship by researchers working in art history, material culture, and communication studies, Sketches from an Unquiet Country follows the fortunes of some of the artists and satiric themes that were prevalent in the centres of Canadian publishing.

From the Roaring Twenties and the Group of Seven to the Automatistes and the early Cold War, Canadian artists lived through and embodied an era of global tumult and change. With an interweaving of historical narrative, lavish illustrations, and writings by many of Canada's most revered cultural figures, Lora Senechal Carney illuminates the lives, perspectives, and works of the era's painters and provides glimpses of the sculptors, poets, dancers, critics, and filmmakers with whom they associated. Canadian Painters in a Modern World gives readers direct access to a carefully curated selection of writings, artworks, photos, and other documents that help to reconstruct the public spheres in which artists including Paul-Emile Borduas, Emily Carr, Alex Colville, Lawren Harris, David Milne, and Pegi Nicol MacLeod circulated. Each of the book's eight chapters consists of a narrative about a key issue or debate, focusing on the relationship of art to politics and society, and on how these are negotiated in an individual's life. Relating artistic engagement with and responses to the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, Senechal Carney discovers a common desire for new connections between art and life. Revealing continuities, ruptures, and watershed moments, Canadian Painters in a Modern World showcases artistic production within specific socio-political contexts to shed new light on Canadian art during three decades of conflict and crisis.