House by the Sea, 1952

Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery, Picture Loan Program Cooper Advertising, 1950s Private Collection, Montreal By descent, Private Collection, Saskatchewan Cowley Abbott, auction, May 26, 2017, lot 34 Private Collection, Toronto

Nancy Townshend, Maxwell Bates: Landscapes / Paysages: 1948-1978, Medicine Hat Museum and Gallery, Medicine Hat, 1982, p. 9, 21 & 29

Bates returned to landscape painting immediately after his arrival back to Calgary in January 1946. Bates had spent 5 years in internment camps as a POW after being captured in France at the onset of the war. At this time, he received tremendous moral support to pursue his own personal expression from Jock Macdonald (head of the Provincial Institute of Technology in Calgary from 1946-7). Macdonald was a particularly important contact for Bates during this period, helping him adjust to post-war life, and encouraging Bates to consider landscapes as appropriate subject matter for painting. In 1949, Bates married Mae Nielson and followed her back to her native New York. In 1949-50, he attended art classes at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, studying under the German Expressionist Max Beckmann, who taught Painting and Drawing. Bates’ landscapes from 1952-53, after he had returned to Calgary in 1951, reflect a painful exploration of potentially conflicting visual concerns such as local colour, naturalistic light and appear fairly abstract, with flattened rather than naturalistic space. By the mid to late 1950s, Bates arrived at a personal style for his landscapes. By subtly introducing the qualities of simplicity and contrasts into the aesthetic ordering and arrangement of his paintings, Bates transcended his adopted Post-Impressionist-Fauvist tradition and began to contribute uniquely to the Canadian landscape tradition.