MONTREAL.- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting Colours of Jazz, 1920s Modernism in Montreal. The Beaver Hall Group, from October 24, 2015, to January 31, 2016. This first exhaustive examination of the Beaver Hall Group will shed new light on this short-lived group of artists (1920-1923) whose production gave “new impetus” to artistic life in Montreal, Quebec and Canada between the two wars. It was one of the most original expressions of pictorial modernism in Canada, with women asserting themselves as professional artists for the first time, on an equal footing with men. The exhibition brings together some 140 works, in addition to more than fifty from the archives, including many rediscovered or never- before-seen paintings.

“The first aesthetic shock that heralded modernity in the Montreal of the Art Deco era, this hitem-in-the-eye school was notable for the vitality of its palette, the friendship among its members and the solidarity among its professional painters … Montreal was alive with the vibrancy of the jazz years, with its industrial activity and its bustling port, and these artists affirmed this confidence in a new world without nostalgia, as seen in a new icon presented in the exhibition, Prudence Heward’s Immigrants,” said Nathalie Bondil, the MMFA’s Director and Chief Curator.

Produced and circulated by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group will present works by its official members and by the artists associated with them through friendship and solidarity. They were to Montreal in a sense what the Group of Seven was to Toronto, but rather than offering an image of Canada’s identity through the depiction of untamed landscapes, they showed their attachment—and applied a modern touch—to portraiture and to humanized cityscapes and landscapes. What they emphasized and presented in a new way was a Northern culture rather than Northern nature.

“For me, the rereading offered by this first retrospective of a little-known Montreal group that is now a vital part of the history of art in Quebec and in Canada, and this hitherto unseen collection of selected works make this a critical event in affirming modernism,” said Jacques Des Rochers, the exhibition’s co-curator.

“I’ve always loved the ways painters and sculptors between the wars pushed art in new directions that captured the dynamism of 1920s Montreal. Because this exhibition deals with so many diverse members of the city’s art community, it's given me a terrific opportunity to build up a much more complex picture than I’d had before, of the potential and the achievements of Montreal art,” said Brian Foss, co-curator of the exhibition, and director, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University, Ottawa.

Covering the key period from 1920 to 1933, from the official existence of the Beaver Hall Group (1920-1923) to the establishment of the Canadian Group of Painters (1933), the exhibition focuses specifically, and for the very first time, on a supremely eloquent body of work: the Montreal artists’ contribution to the earliest manifestations of modernity. Indeed, the Canadian Group of Painters, which included a number of the leading painters of the Beaver Hall Group among its founding members, would later incorporate the Toronto and Montreal groups, but also many emerging figures across Canada, representing an expansion of the art scene and another paradigm for the history of Canadian art.

More than twenty institutions, among the most prestigious in the country, and close to fifty private collectors have loaned paintings to the exhibition, which presents a remarkable body of work. As such, visitors to the exhibition will be able to revisit iconic paintings or rediscover major or significant works that have been rarely if ever exhibited since they were created.

1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group features works by Nora Collyer, Emily Coonan, Adrien and Henri Hébert, Prudence Heward, Randolph S. Hewton, Edwin Holgate, A.Y. Jackson, John Y. Johnstone, Mabel Lockerby, Mabel May, Hal Ross Perrigard, Robert W. Pilot, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage, Adam Sherriff Scott, Regina Seiden and Lilias Torrance Newton, along with André Biéler, Ethel Seath, Kathleen Morris and Albert Robinson.