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William Ronald 1926 - 1998 Canadian oil on board Untitled 36 x 48 inches 91.4 x 121.9 centimeters signed and dated 1954 Provenance:Collection of the Artist Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Toronto In the mid-1950s, Painters Eleven was coming together as one of the earliest organized groups to promote abstract art in Canada. As its youngest member, William Ronald was still trying to find his unique identity by working his way through early modernism and the styles of his teachers and contemporaries. Like his In Dawn the Heart (painted in 1954 and acquired only a year later for what is now the Art Gallery of Ontario), this untitled work was influenced ultimately by Analytic Cubism. That movement changed everything in art, reducing the picture plane to earth-coloured, rectangular snippets of the world, each corresponding to a moment of perception that could be creatively rearranged in keeping with a subjective, emotional logic that did not have to correspond to the real world. Ronald was also influenced by mentors and colleagues like Jock Macdonald - some of whose works of the 1950s have superficially similar characteristics - as well as other members of Painters Eleven. To some extent, all of them were seeing Analytic Cubism via the works of the New York School. For instance, the German-American Hans Hofmann was an influential teacher of abstraction, specializing in rectangular planes floating against indeterminate spaces. Ronald would later adopt a much brighter palette like Hofmann's intense primary and secondary colours, but in 1954 his works were dark and seemingly solemn. In this regard, they were probably influenced more by another member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, Franz Kline, whose large-scale, calligraphic works of the mid-1950s were almost all starkly black and white. At first glance, Ronald's untitled painting also resembles the Black and White abstractions of fellow Canadian Paul-Émile Borduas. Ronald met Borduas (like Hofmann and Kline) in New York. However, Borduas began to produce his iconic Black and White paintings two to three years later, so it is likely that the two Canadians were responding to the same external influences rather than to each other. In any case, Borduas's abstractions are more tightly structured, more heavily painted and tidier than Ronald's untitled work, which shows instead a dense thicket of splattered paint, sketchy reversals of figure and ground, and innumerable dribbled threads of colour. This violently expressive, almost cavalier, attitude is less akin to Borduas's more cerebral approach than it is to that of the infamous Jackson Pollock, then at the height of his notoriety. Like Pollock's work, Ronald's painting is not a tidy presentation of some preconceived idea. It is instead about a spontaneous, sensual immersion in painting as an activity in and of itself, which had led art critic Harold Rosenberg to coin the phrase ""action painting"" in 1952. This approach was related to the Beat Generation's indifference to mainstream values and their celebration of unorthodoxy and hedonistic self-expression. The interplay of structure and improvisation was also directly inspired by bebop jazz, in which the rhythm section supplied a kind of scaffolding for melodic flights of fancy ranging from harmony to dissonance. Ronald's painting is less a black and white meditation than a species of ""visual bebop"" - its shaky grid of rectangles dancing with layers of gold, blue, pink and lilac. Threads of green, gold and white insinuate themselves above, below and between patches of black and white that ""keep the beat."" Meanwhile, Ronald's later, more flamboyantly hipster personality lurks just behind the surface, threatening to jump out in a solo worthy of Charlie Parker. He would arrive at that unique visual identity in less than two years. This important early work is a precursor to Ronald's central image works, revealing a young artist whose aspirations were staggeringly audacious and whose talent was outsized to match. We thank Robert Belton, author of The Life and Art of William Ronald: The Theatre of the Self and currently Dean at the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, for contributing the above essay.