Painter made mark on Canadian arts scene

This weekend on NewmarketToday, I will be featuring another prominent local artist who achieved worldwide acclaim within the art world.

In past columns, I have featured several local artists including George W. Luesby and Dorothy Clarke McClure as well as the incomparable J.W. Jefferies, father of Canadian heritage art.

This weekend, we shall examine the history and works of Robert Frederick Hagan and his place within the Canadian art scene. I am not an art historian, so my examination will centre on what the experts have to say about his work.

Hagan was born on May 21, 1918, in Cabbagetown, Toronto, and died on Sept. 6, 2003, in Newmarket.

Hagan’s art education included the Ontario College of Art, with John Martin Alfsen, Fred Hayes and Franklin Carmichael, of the Group of Seven, as his instructors. He also attended the Art Students League in New York and George C. Miller’s lithography shop, New York (1946).

Hagan was a bit of a renaissance man, known as a Canadian lithographer, painter, and art instructor. He was awarded several honours during his career including the Canadian Centennial Medal in 1967 and the Royal Canadian Academy Medal in 1998.

During his career, Hagan held memberships in the Canadian Society of Graphic Arts, where he was elected president three times and made an honorary member in 1965, the Canadian Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Print and Drawing Council of Canada. His work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Glenbow Museum, and numerous other Canadian galleries.

At the age of 19, Hagan took his brushes, oil paints, small plywood panels and near-boundless energy to capture the colour, bustle and unfolding drama of his immediate neighbourhood and Toronto at large. In an unheated garage-turned-studio, he expanded his street work onto large canvases. Additionally, after studying at the Ontario College of Art under Carmichael and Alfsen in the early 1940s, Hagan began exhibiting with the Royal Canadian Academy at the age of 21.

His early life seems to have been a bit stressful as, when he was only 13 years old, his father died, leaving his mother with eight children to support. Hagan was forced to find work, leaving school early to help support his family. While working at a series of semi-skilled factory jobs (including work in a paper-box factory) during the day, he developed an interest in art that led him to attend evening classes in drawing and painting. If you can imagine, he managed to attend night school at Central Technical School, and then, while continuing to work, he studied at night at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto.

He got his big start when four of his drawings were selected to be hung at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which led to his exhibiting his work at the Royal Canadian Academy. In 1941, he became the resident artist at Pickering College, living on campus until he got married in 1943 and taught evening classes at the Northern Vocational School in Toronto. Eventually, he settled in Newmarket and moved into a flat in a house across the street from Pickering College, having married Isabelle Heald, a Toronto girl. In 1946, he studied at the Art Students League and studied printmaking at George C. Miller’s lithography shop.

By 1946, he had joined the faculty at the Ontario College of Art, where he taught lithography, drawing, painting, and printmaking for almost four decades. He became the head of printmaking at OCAD in 1955 — a position he maintained until his retirement in 1983.

He was then living in Newmarket and commuting to Toronto, like so many of our citizens, for the next 37 years.

Hagan lived across the road from my grandparents, who lived on Lundy’s Lane. The long summer months at his home in Newmarket, away from the college, were a time for his own pursuits and passions. He recorded his family, friends and the country life in his paintings, illustrating a fascinating social commentary of 1940s life in Ontario. Drawn to capture the things around him, he often painted his desk drawers and kitchen utensils.

In 1967, he exhibited with some other staff members from OCAD at the Art Gallery of Brant. Then, in 1977, he mounted a retrospective at the Grimsby Public Library and Art Gallery, titled Hagan, the Mind, and the Hand. In 1967, Hagan was awarded the Canadian Centennial Medal.

In 1985, Canada Post commissioned a set of stamps on the theme of Canadian explorers. Between 1986 and 1989, Hagan released Exploration of Canada, a series of 16 stamps for Canada Post.

In 1998, he was awarded the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal. His long and impressive career had led to his work finding a place in the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, and some public buildings in Newmarket. The town named a court just off Gorham Street after Hagan.

The permanent collections of more than 20 Canadian museums house more than 700 of his works including 83 that are exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada.

It has been said Hagan left a great legacy as a teacher at the Ontario College of Art. He is credited with challenging his students and giving focus to their technical background. It is also said his invitations to great parties held at his home were the stuff of legend.

In total, Hagan’s career as a painter, lithographer, watercolourist, and art instructor spanned more than seven decades and inspired generations of emerging young artists. According to the National Art Gallery archives, he was not specifically affiliated with a particular art movement or school of thought, his work being described as autobiographical. The Canadian arts community seems in agreement that Hagan was one of Canada’s greatest artists, a great teacher, and a unique personality.

Hagan’s unique work has for decades responded to and shaped Canadian painting. He looked to his environment as the source for his artistic subjects. Critics say this is evident in his collection of work, Close to Home: Paintings from 1940-1990. The works offer an intimate glimpse into the artist’s home and studio — masterpieces honouring the humble objects found there.

Immersed in a culture of painting that increasingly favoured abstraction, Hagan remained firmly committed to his figurative style with little investment in self-promotion. But the artist’s canvases were nonetheless deeply symbolic, powerful, and energized portraits of humanity that combined Cubist, Mannerist, Expressionist, and even Classical principles of composition while ultimately creating a style all his own, rooted in his personal, existential questioning.

Hagan died in Newmarket on Sept. 6, 2003. There is a plaque in his honour located at 262 Ontario St. in Toronto. His papers were sent to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s E. P. Taylor Research Library and Archives.

This column, along with the others in the NewmarketToday series, are intended to spark conversation about local heritage topics, to inspire the reader to learn more about the topic on offer. They are not intended as a complete history or a definitive treatment of a subject but merely as a wetting of one’s appetite for a particular topic.

Hopefully, I will see you all back here next weekend.

Sources: Information and photos from Karl Hagan; the Frederick Hagan Fonds (PDF) E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives — Art Gallery of Ontario website; A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Vol. 2 (third edition) by Colin S. MacDonald; Frederick Hagan — the Bau-Xi Gallery website; Frederick Hagan — National Gallery of Canada website; Cabbagetown People — The Social History of a Canadian Inner-City Neighbourhood — website; The Frederick Hagan Legacy — Globe and Mail article; article from the Toronto Star

Newmarket resident Richard MacLeod, the History Hound, has been a local historian for more than 40 years. He writes a weekly feature about our town’s history in partnership with NewmarketToday, conducts heritage lectures and walking tours of local interest, and leads local oral history interviews.

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