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PARTISAN REVIEW
drals - buttresses or door jambs - that had somehow come adrift.
Hide showed only two works at Emmerich, one a rather restrained
(for him) "classical" assembly with an open frame held aloft, like an echo
of a Cubist
gueridon.
It reminded me, at several removes, of Smith's
tabletop still life sculptures of the early 1960s, but I preferred the second,
larger piece, a tough, unpredictable variation of the
gueridon
theme,
rather like an oversized, demented fire hydrant. Paradoxically both solid
and springy below, with massive, crumpled sheets "waving" above, it was
baroque without being florid, grand without being pompous. From
some views, the soft convexities of the "front" were surprisingly angular
and skeletal. Both sculptures were vigorous and arresting, but it would
be nice to see more Hides. I've been following his work for about fif–
teen years and am convinced that as good as the pieces he showed at
Emmerich were, he's even more original than they suggest. Hide is a
welcome addition to the scene, and we can only hope to see more work
in the future.
Edmonton, Alberta, where Hide teaches, is an anomaly - a small,
remote but sophisticated city with more than its share of good, serious
abstract artists, among them an even more disproportionate number of
good, serious abstract sculptors. No , it's not all Hide's doing, although
he certainly has been an important influence on some of the younger
generation, many of them his former students. But Hide came
to
a city
(and a region) with a long history of direct connections with advanced
abstraction. This isn't the place for a history of Western Canadian mod–
ernism, but briefly, he joined a community in Alberta and neighboring
Saskatchewan of ambitious veterans of workshops led by luminaries
ranging from Barnett Newman to Frank Stella, as well as Kenneth
Noland, Michael Steiner, Olitski, and Caro, among others. Several gifted
young sculptors about Hide's age, notably Douglas Bentham in
Saskatchewan and Alan Reynolds in Edmonton itself, were already be–
ginning to declare their presence through their muscular, original works
when Hide arrived.
Reynolds 's evolution was explored in a fifteen-year retrospective
organized by the Edmonton Art Gallery in September and October.
(A
slightly reduced version of the show will tour Canadian museums.) He's
an impressive artist, perhaps the closest to Smith in spirit of any of his
generation. Like Smith's, Reynolds's work depends a great deal on
touch. The early works in wood that established his reputation (and
made him one of the first young Canadians to be shown at Toronto's
famed David Mirvish Gallery) combined straightforward joinery with
peculiar drawing in the form of eccentrically-cut edges and slashes. He
has been able to incorporate this evidence of the hand into his recent
