Collection: Cosgrove, Stanley

Stanley Cosgrove, a great contemporary Quebec artist

A great Canadian master, painter, and teacher, Stanley Morel Cosgrove, ARC (Royal Canadian Academy of Arts) was born in Montreal in 1911 (died 2002). The contemporary artist studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. Stanley Cosgrove's work focuses on the human figure, still life, and the Canadian landscape, a landscape he treats in an original way. In Cosgrove's oil paintings, these landscapes will remain classics for many people due to their unusual spirit and the quality of their composition, where the vertical effects of the trees always provoke fascination and astonishment. Mystery and poetry emanate from his oil paintings on canvas. "My research doesn't consist of changing subjects, but of infinitely combining colors and geometries. It's almost scientific work."

Color and geometry as inspirations

"Stanley Cosgrove was, throughout his life and still today, a highly valued artist among collectors. His unique style as a landscaper and still life painter made him a creator apart. His most singular color harmonies, both sober and contrasting, were inspired by his many stays in Mexico, whose saturated light is similar to that of Quebec in winter. Moreover, Cosgrove was more a painter of light than of subject. What mattered to him was the ambiance, the poetic atmosphere created by an intriguing and mysterious luminosity. Both muted and dazzling, each canvas imposes itself with finesse and delicacy. A painter whom time will make us rediscover from a new angle." Robert Bernier

A Quebec painter, Cosgrove's works of art can be found in several important private, public and corporate collections both in Canada and internationally: Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec), Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (Montreal), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Tel Aviv Museum (Israel), etc.

ADDITIONAL ARTICLE(S):

Stanley Cosgrove

Stanley Cosgrove was born in 1911 in the Pointe St-Charles neighborhood of Montreal. He entered the Montreal School of Fine Arts in 1929, where he remained for six years. Upon graduating, Cosgrove participated in several exhibitions, and his work received critical acclaim. In 1939, he received the Athanase-David scholarship to study in France, but delayed his departure to present an exhibition of his work at the Quebec School of Fine Arts. War was declared, disrupting his plans. He first went to New York City and stayed there for a few weeks before heading to Mexico. This pivotal period would have a profound impact on the artist. Cosgrove enrolled in a drawing class at the San Carlos Academy and then traveled throughout the country. Back in Mexico City, he worked as Orozco's assistant on a mural the great Mexican artist was creating for the chapel of a hospital in the city. Upon his return to Quebec, he began teaching at the Montreal School of Fine Arts. At that time, the director, Charles Maillard, had a problem. This problem was Alfred Pellan, who, according to Maillard, had too much influence over the school's young students. He therefore invited Cosgrove to share Pellan's teaching duties. Cosgrove left the School of Fine Arts in 1958.

Landscape has always been one of his favorite subjects, along with still life and women. In the 1950s, his language asserted itself and found a pictorial meaning that the artist would treat with numerous variations. The influence of his years spent in Mexico is still omnipresent. Cosgrove would say of Mexico, "there is no color, it's black and white." His color palette is reduced, his almost monochrome paintings leave a delicate imprint, as if the image emerged of its own accord on the canvas. The subject appears in its simplest expression. During this period, he painted landscapes in muted colors whose contrast is imposed by echo, hues all in subtlety, on the verge of saturation. The painter's pictorial nuances are pieces of poetry, both literally and figuratively. The artist, by his own admission, paints to make life viable, to move. "...Some see painting as an obscure problem complicated by new forms. I do not think that the truth is more in yesterday's formula than in tomorrow's; it is situated on a spiritual plane too complex, too superior to be confined within one or more temporal formulas, however attractive they may be. Is it not above all important to provoke, in the sensitive observer, that impulse which elevates him beyond the visual aspect of things, deeper, more comprehensive, making painting a transfiguration of even the most apparently poetic objects?" The paintings of the fifties illustrate, better than any others, this tendency towards transfiguration, towards landscapes coming from everywhere and nowhere, arising from both reality and the imaginary, from the visible and the invisible. In these works of a certain candor, the artist's brush barely sketches the motif and favors a search for color, in the barely audible murmur of an inner voice.

Source: Robert Bernier, Un siècle de peinture au Québec Nature et paysage, Les Éditions de l’Homme, 1999, Stanley Cosgrove, pages 186-187.

Stanley Cosgrove (1911-2002)

[…] The artist has his favorite subjects: landscape, still life, and women. His entire work revolves around these three themes without deviating from them. Not only has he remained faithful to these themes, but he has always maintained essentially the same plastic approach. In certain aspects, such a choice, which does not avoid a certain monotony, can appear to reflect a lack of imagination or audacity, although everything depends on the angle of observation. Repetition, in Cosgrove, has a positive dimension insofar as the artist approaches his themes according to a very broad register. In fact, his work has never ceased to transform itself, but with subtlety, a bit like the musician who introduces fine nuances into his playing, who sometimes modifies the resonance of the piece, sometimes the rhythm. For one fact remains: Cosgrove plays with the delicate. His chromatic range is muted: the tones are similar in intensity, but some are higher, the overall effect giving the work its depth. It is precisely in his way of playing with color that the artist gives countless faces to the themes that are dear to him. Cosgrove had begun to work with this light, which, by its intensity, literally overwhelms color, when he was living in Mexico, in the 1940s.

While Cosgrove devotes most of his creative energy to painting, drawing occupies an equally fundamental place in his approach. The artist draws fertile inspiration from women, full of nuance and gentleness. His line dances across the paper and delivers, in a completely unique way, an extraordinary blend of rhythm and breath, punctuated by eroticism with its unique flavor.

Stanley Cosgrove has left his mark on local painting in more ways than one. While he cannot be described as a great colorist, he required a thorough understanding of the interplay of colors to create a painting as subtle and powerful in its totality. There is no doubt that he occupies, and will long occupy, a special place among lovers of figurative art and art in general.

Source: Robert Bernier,  La peinture au Québec depuis les années 1960, Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2002, Cosgrove Stanley Cosgrove (1911-2002), pages 289-291.

TO LEARN MORE:

. WIKIPEDIA - STANLEY COSGROVE

. NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA - STANLEY COSGROVE