Spector, 1960

Mazelow Gallery, Toronto The Vincent Price Collection for Sears Private Collection Andrew Auctions, auction, Toronto, 1999 Joan Murray, Whitby Private Collection

Harold Town came to prominence as an artist in the high years of Canadian abstract expressionism with Painters Eleven. He quickly rose to the top of Canadian art's hit parade charts and stayed there. Critics have named his Painters Eleven period as his most significant, but his work was highly diverse, as revealed in a retrospective of 1986. What obsessed Town was panache or "style," having fun and a feeling of growth and movement. The mark of a good Town is a sort of motor force that races within the confines of his subject. He had himself an almost demonic energy, swinging from pillar to post, but the viewer could never doubt the sense of invention in his different series, from his Spectors in 1960, one of which, "The Spector No. 3", won the Canada Council Purchase Award at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 77th Annual Spring Exhibition, to the paintings he titled "Tyranny of the Corner", his collages, his minimal and psychedelic period, his Stretches, his Snaps, his Toy Horses, and more. Clearly, Town ventured into the brave new world of modern art in Canada with a positive assertiveness, giving his motifs the right emphatic power. Vincent Price would have been delighted by the work and purchased it for the Sears Price Collection because of its high quality. He also may have been intrigued by the painting because of its subject, since as a movie actor his career was associated with the burgeoning genres of horror, mystery and science fiction. As a lifelong collector, he had learned to buy art extremely well, and in developing the Vincent Price Collection for Sears, he sought to combine the great masters, such as Rembrandt and Picasso, with the best contemporary artists. During the 1960s, Vincent Price was perhaps the most visible and vocal spokesperson for the visual arts in the United States. The purchase of "Spector" by this famous and sophisticated public figure suggests its importance to Canadian art. Like other work in the 1960s, the pictorial space is divided into distinct areas. The work has a dominant, centralizing form, which gathers up the glowing colour, rich texture and fierce painterly activity. In "Spector", Town critically confronted the question of surface and structure, animating them to assist in his own way with challenging the central image so much a part of his work, that of other members of Painters Eleven and painters worldwide. We extend our thanks to Joan Murray, Canadian art historian, for contributing the preceding essay.