The folks at the Massey Theatre have extended the Joseph Plaskett exhibit to run until July 27, one month longer than originally planned.
“It’s been very popular,” said executive director Jessica Schneider. “We’ve had groups coming in, all times of day, and people with connections to Joe. They knew him, they brought their grandchildren to show this calibre of artist that all of these people grew up with as their neighbour.”
Plaskett, who was born in New Westminster and died last fall at the age of 96, was known for his oil and pastel paintings often depicting everyday life – everything from tiger lilies in a vase to a tea house in the countryside.
He was the first recipient of the Emily Carr art scholarship in 1946, which allowed him to travel to Paris and study with Fernand Léger and Jean Lombard, etching and engraving with Stanley William Hayter. Plaskett was also a pupil of Hans Hofmann and studied with many prominent Canadian painters, including A.Y. Jackson, Jack Shadbolt, Lawren Harris and Jock Macdonald.
Despite these influences, Plaskett didn’t receive the notoriety he deserved in his career, according to curator Paul Crawford.
“He would lament to me about the frustrations he felt of trying to find critical recognition, not so much from the commercial end of things, but from the public gallery sector here in Canada, especially in British Columbia where the Vancouver Art Gallery wasn’t really interested in collecting more of his work,” Crawford said of previous conversations with Plaskett. “That really bothered me. It’s not just Joe unfortunately, it’s a generation of artists that if you didn’t kind of fall into one group or the other, you’d sort of be written out of the art history.”
The Massey Theatre exhibit, meanwhile, showcases some of Plaskett’s work from 1943 to 1958. Crawford, who’s based at the Penticton Art Gallery, gained access to the Plaskett archives a few years ago.
“What I found when I went there was just this wealth of material that just hadn’t seen the light of day,” he recalled of the hundreds of paintings. “It probably hadn’t been out publically in this kind of form since the ‘50s.”
It wasn’t easy choosing the 30-something pieces for the exhibit, Crawford said.
“I wanted to show people not the classic Joe Plaskett everybody would be familiar with, but I was more interested in his development to that point, just showing that evolution of him as an artist because I think everybody knows the pastels and the dinner table scenes and the Paris landscapes, but I don’t think anyone really knows where it all came from.
“I want to put him in the modernist context because I think a lot of people think his work is antiquated or out of sync with what was going on, but it’s not like that didn’t inform his career or his work.”
Plaskett lived abroad most of his life, but returned to the Royal City almost annually. He sold his Paris home in 2004 and dedicated all the proceeds to creating the Plaskett Foundation. Every year, the foundation awards $25,000 to a young Canadian student so he or she can study art in Europe for one year.
For more information, visit www.masseytheatre.com .
