{"id":373074,"date":"2026-04-10T14:45:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T14:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/373074\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T14:45:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T14:45:08","slug":"lost-abstract-artist-edna-tacon-rediscovered-at-art-gallery-of-ontario","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/373074\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost abstract artist Edna Ta\u00e7on rediscovered at Art Gallery of Ontario"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

A self\u2010portrait of Edna Ta\u00e7on.Estate of Edna Ta\u00e7on\/Supplied<\/p>\n

In her day, abstract artist Edna Ta\u00e7on was so well regarded she showed at the New York museum that later became the Guggenheim and mounted exhibitions in Toronto with Lawren Harris. Today, she is all but forgotten. <\/p>\n

Art Gallery of Ontario curator Ren\u00e9e van der Avoird is working to correct that oversight with a small exhibition devoted to the artist\u2019s collages, drawings and paintings from the 1940s. She discovered a single work by Ta\u00e7on in the AGO\u2019s holdings and, struck by a familiar last name, contacted the Ontario sculptor Carl Ta\u00e7on. \u201cThat\u2019s my grandmother,\u201d he said. And so, van der Avoird began to discover both Ta\u00e7on\u2019s art and the sad story of family estrangement that may partly explain why she disappeared from view.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a tricky balance to include some biographical information, not too much,\u201d van der Avoird said. \u201cBut I think the power of the work is coming from who she was, her life experience and how art was really everything for her. She overcame so much to achieve the success she did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ta\u00e7on was born in Milwaukee, Wis., in 1905. Her father was a musician in vaudeville theatres, but after he died from tuberculosis, her mother was unable to provide for her. She was adopted by a Canadian woman at the age of 6 and grew up in Goderich, Ont. She was musical, studied in Toronto and became a professional violinist, travelling regularly to New York to perform concerts, but also made art on the side. The AGO show includes several lively collages of coloured and metallic papers that would have been made at her kitchen table. <\/p>\n

In 1929, she married Ontario artist and art teacher Percy Ta\u00e7on, but the marriage was troubled perhaps, van der Avoird suggests, because he was envious of her artistic success. The curator has studied family letters that show how by the time her two sons were approaching adolescence, she was spending months in a New York hotel not merely for work, but also as a means to escape abuse. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Edna Ta\u00e7on’s Aurora, 1945.Estate of Edna Ta\u00e7on\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Ta\u00e7on began to exhibit her art in New York and Toronto in the 1940s. In New York, she showed at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, encouraged by Hilla Rebay, the abstract artist and co-founder of what eventually became the Guggenheim Museum. The war years and their immediate aftermath were a time of cultural ferment in the city, partly fuelled by European emigr\u00e9 artists, and Ta\u00e7on was an active participant. <\/p>\n

In Toronto, in the days when department stores sold high art, she showed at Eaton\u2019s, hanging her paintings against tall grey curtains just as they were displayed in New York. The Eaton\u2019s shows included a two-person exhibition in 1945 with Harris, who shared her interest in abstract art that spoke to a spiritual or internal life. She also began to show at the Art Gallery of Toronto, as the AGO was then known, alongside Harris and other members of the Canadian Group of Painters \u2013 the successor to the Group of Seven \u2013 which she was invited to join. <\/p>\n

The current AGO show includes several examples of this period: dynamic geometric abstractions where colourful triangles and parallelograms intersect with circles, crescents and more biomorphic forms, all hovering in deep space. They recall early 20th-century European experiments in abstraction and Ta\u00e7on was the first Canadian artist to apply the term \u201cnon-objective\u201d to her art, a form of pure abstraction that contained no reference to figuration or images from the outside world. <\/p>\n

This approach was pioneered by early 20th-century Russian artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, who was allied with theosophy and its belief in seeking a higher realm. The art was also, in a way, an escape from the violent realities of two world wars and the Depression. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really about expressing your inner life. Edna calls it outbursts of the soul. It\u2019s about finding ecstasy, and it\u2019s really in line with Kandinsky\u2019s theories, that are theosophical and spiritual,\u201d van der Avoird said.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Untitled Abstraction, 1945.Estate of Edna Ta\u00e7on\/Supplied<\/p>\n

She also sees a direct link with Ta\u00e7on\u2019s music.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a musician, there was this wonderful synergy between playing a piece of classical music that doesn\u2019t necessarily reference a thing, and then working non-objectively in art. They really go hand-in-hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ta\u00e7on\u2019s marriage broke up in 1947 and she remained permanently in New York, while her sons stayed in Canada. Their father obtained sole custody and told them that their mother had abandoned them. He also made it difficult for her to return to Canada by threatening a bigamy charge against her when she remarried. She was finally reunited with her family when her granddaughter Claudia was born in 1979, but she died the following year.<\/p>\n

By that time, she had abandoned abstraction. There had been a young artist at the Museum of Non-Objective Art who worked as a doorman, custodian and frame-maker; his name was Jackson Pollock. As his explosive brand of abstraction, dubbed abstract expressionism, took hold in New York, Ta\u00e7on retreated from the non-objective and began painting flowers and landscapes. Van der Avoird includes only one work from this period in her show: a 1955 self-portrait that shows a proud figure holding a Siamese cat, intersected by geometric planes. <\/p>\n

AGO reveals identity of woman in rare Black 18th-century portrait<\/a><\/p>\n

Although the AGO did mount an exhibition of her work in 1988, Ta\u00e7on\u2019s central role in introducing modernism to Canada is largely forgotten. The curator figures that the trauma of her first marriage and her divided life were part of the reason. <\/p>\n

\u201cShe was sort of split between Canada and the U.S. and didn\u2019t have a solid footing in either country. That duality didn\u2019t help her. If she had come back to Toronto and stayed here, maybe she would have had another legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Guggenheim had acquired two of Ta\u00e7on\u2019s works in the 1940s but never properly catalogued them. When the AGO asked to borrow them for this show, the New York museum finally accessioned those works officially. Meanwhile, Paul and Susan Ta\u00e7on, the artist\u2019s now elderly son and his wife, have promised to donate to the AGO several works from the family collection. Edna Ta\u00e7on\u2019s legacy may yet be secured.<\/p>\n

Edna Ta\u00e7on: Verve and Decorum continues to Aug. 31 at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: A self\u2010portrait of Edna Ta\u00e7on.Estate of Edna Ta\u00e7on\/Supplied In her day, abstract artist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,14485,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-373074","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-noastack","17":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}