Artwork by William Perehudoff,  AC-84-39

William Perehudoff
AC-84-39

acrylic on canvas
signed, titled and dated 1984 on the reverse
52 x 76 ins ( 132.1 x 193 cms )

Auction Estimate: $35,000.00$25,000.00 - $35,000.00

Price Realized $38,400.00
Sale date: December 6th 2023

Provenance:
Private Collection, Ontario
Literature:
Karen Wilkin, Roald Nasgaard and Robert Christie, “The Optimism of Colour: William Perehudoff, A Retrospective”, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 2011, page 22
Among Canada’s foremost modernist painters, William Perehudoff’s work has been associated with a number of post–war artistic movements over the span of several decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, Perehudoff attended several iterations of the Emma Lake Artist’s Workshop in Saskatchewan. The workshops had evolved into an important venue for artists to associate and collaborate, and brought Perehudoff into contact with prominent artists such as Kenneth Noland, Donald Judd and Anthony Caro. Perehudoff and his wife and fellow painter, Dorothy Knowles, owned a lakefront cottage not far from the workshops, allowing them frequent access to this valuable artistic resource. The 1980s were a productive period for the artist, during which he experimented with bold contrasts in the surface qualities of his paintings. Perehudoff mixed acrylic paints with gel mediums, allowing him to create textural swathes of colour placed on soft backgrounds. Art historian Karen Wilkin observed, “a rapid survey of his mature work reveals him habitually taking advantage of present day acrylic paint’s ability to be dense or thin, transparent or opaque, fluid or resistant, among many other properties. This history of the painting’s making, no matter how fresh and direct the finished work appears to be, is part of its meaning.”

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William Perehudoff
(1919 - 2013) RCA

William Perehudoff was born in Langham, Saskatchewan and maintained a connection to this area throughout his life. In 1944, the Saskatoon Art Centre opened, and this provided Perehudoff with early and important access to art. Within a couple of years he was exhibiting regularly in group exhibitions such as the Saskatoon Exhibition and the Art Centre fall show. Throughout this phase of his development as an artist, he farmed in the summer and devoted himself to painting and his art education in the winter. Like many artists of the time, Perehudoff had been influenced by the motivations and methodologies of social realist artists such as Diego Rivera.  Perehudoff took instruction from the influential French muralist Jean Charlot, as well as Amédé Ozenfant in New York, the French Purist and associate of Le Corbusier.  Kenneth Noland, a very important colour field painter, was also a major influence to his work. Since the 1960s, Perehudoff was a central figure in Canadian abstraction. The effect of the flat plains and open skies that are so dramatically present throughout Saskatchewan seem to be detectable in his work. William Perehudoff received the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1994 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Regina in 2003. He was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1998.