William Ronald
William Ronald R.C.A. (1926-1998) (variant name William Smith Ronald) was an important Canadian painter, best known as the 1954 founder of the Painters Eleven.
Ronald was born in Stratford, Ontario and raised in Brampton. He left for New York City after studies at the Ontario College of Art because, being a hockey player, he qualified for a Canadian Amateur Hockey Association scholarship. Ronald applied stating only that he would “love to go to New York to study with Hans Hofmann and get to know other painters.”
In l952, he visited New York for six months, attended Hofmann’s classes and lived on Leyroy Street and then later on Second Avenue. Hofmann was not only one of the foremost teachers and philosophers of art, he was the leading educator of modern artists in the United States. Second Avenue was the noisy, vibrant Jewish neighbourhood of street vendors, delicatessens and clothing stores. Ronald saw theatre, heard jazz and devoured the art scene. For a boy born in Stratford who grew up in Fergus and Brampton it was a new world. He knew he would be back.
In staid Toronto, during the 1950s, the windows of the Robert Simpson Company at Queen and Yonge provided one of the few sources of visual excitement. In October of 1953, onlookers were perplexed and surprised by the abstract art featured in the room settings of the Home Furnishings Department. The initiator was a Simpson’s display artist and window dresser named William Ronald. The art and publicity for Abstracts at Home stimulated enough interest that a month later, the seven artists involved plus four others, decided to try for a real exhibition. These artists were Alexandra Luke, Harold Town, Oscar Cahen, Kazuo Nakamura, Jack Bush, Hortense Gordon, Walter Yarwood, Ray Mead, Tom Hodgson, Jock Macdonald and William Ronald. In February l954, Painters Eleven, as they had named themselves, had their first exhibition at Roberts Gallery in Toronto. It was a seminal moment for art in Canada.
The work of Painters Eleven was aggressive and challenging. Many viewers, whose sensibilities still lay in the 19th century, or with the Group of Seven, did not know how to react. Gallery goers in New York, and to a lesser extent in Montreal, had been gradually exposed to new work which could be seen in the context of international change. For the most part Torontonians were ignorant of these developments, so the abruptness of the change to cutting edge art was harder for them to handle. Ronald observed that “the collectors in Toronto were only 100 miles from the Albright Knox in Buffalo and they didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
New York Years:
After one more show with Painters Eleven at the Roberts Gallery in l955, Ronald moved to New York. His break came when Robert Beverly Hale, the Curator of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum was in Toronto, saw Ronald’s work and invited him to visit when in New York. Then Ronald sold a work to a well known New York collector, Countess Ingeborg de Beausac. To celebrate her new apartment and her new painting, ‘Inge’ threw a large party. Among the guests was the leading art dealer Samuel Kootz who was taken aback that his client had bought an unknown Ronald rather than a Soulages. However, Kootz, always on the lookout for new talent, agreed to come to Ronald’s studio located in a decaying building in a rundown area. Kootz was a fastidious man. Between his comments on the “goddamned rats as big as dogs” he asked for five paintings. One was subsequently bought by the Guggenheim Museum. Kootz took him on.
William Ronald’s first commercial solo exhibition opened in New York in April l957. Ronald was on top of the world. The weekend the show opened, the Sunday New York Times featured a photograph of one of the works with a positive review. Jock Macdonald, Ronald’s teacher and mentor at the Ontario College of Art, flew down for the opening. Macdonald was proud of him and generous in his praise, telling Kootz, “I see no end to his talent.” Ronald says that statement has carried him throughout his entire career. Kootz represented Hofmann, Kline, Rothko, Motherwell and de Kooning. “Kline complimented me on my work. I couldn’t believe it. Rothko came to the Kootz Gallery later, when no one was there. He sat down and looked at one of my paintings for 20 minutes. I never spoke to him. I was shell-shocked. They all came to my first show.”
Ronald had not cut his ties with Painters Eleven. He negotiated an invitation for the group to exhibit at the 20th Anniversary of American Abstract Artists held at the Riverside Museum in New York, April 8, l956. It was the greatest hour for Painters Eleven. Ronald came back to Toronto to have a solo exhibition at Av Isaac’s Greenwich Gallery in November of that year. He showed at Laing Galleries in April l960 and with Isaacs Gallery in l961. He returned a hero. He had made it in New York. “The art scene was so strong. New York had taken it away from Paris and the fucking French. I’m so grateful to have been there.”
Ronald was under contract and producing 18 canvasses a year for Kootz and did so for seven years. The scene was so hot that paintings were going out the door wet. During this time Ronald and his first wife, Helen, decided to move out of New York to a house on an acre of land in New Jersey. “Then, like now, you have to be rich or poor to live in New York. In retrospect, it was a mistake.” By l963, he had taken out American citizenship. He thought he was going to be in the U.S. forever.
That year his last exhibition with Kootz opened on December 1st. When he and Helen got back from a holiday there was a letter from Kootz terminating the relationship. Ronald was stunned and didn’t know what to do. Jock Macdonald had said “Never come back to Canada. “Hofmann said “Well, you can always go back to Canada.” Ronald didn’t remember Macdonald’s advice. “Well, I’ve got two beautiful daughters and six grandchildren I wouldn’t have had if I stayed in New York.”
Perhaps Kootz saw the direction changing: painterly abstraction had run its course and was being overtaken by a cooler, non-expressionistic approach. But Ronald’s work defies easy labeling. It has never been purely abstract expressionist or non-objective. If anything, Surrealism has continued to have an enduring influence on his work.
When asked which artists of the New York School he admired or who may have influenced him directly or indirectly he remembers how Pollock “released everybody... he was exciting... crazy.” Franz Kline’s bold black and white strokes on a large canvases drove his equivalent positive and negative forces to the limit. Hofmann, the teacher of structural clarity, pushed his own work beyond structure stating that “The aim of art is to vitalize form.” Although plane was Hofmann’s key formal means he advocated that a “picture should be made with feeling not knowing.” Ronald speaks of Bradley Walker Tomlin as “a great artist who never got the attention he deserved.” Tomlin’s use of underlying grids did influence Ronald because his geometric shapes were used to achieve a fluid and organic structure. But it is Jock Macdonald who remains closest to Ronald’s heart. When Macdonald died in l960, Ronald lost a man he considered to be not only the most important influence in his life, but also a foster father. “He was closer than most fathers could ever be. He was eager. I was eager. When he died it was awful... just awful.”
Return to Canada:
Ronald came home and branched out in a new direction. He started broadcasting with CBC-TV and then CBC-FM. For three years he was on-air host of ‘As It Happens’ and then went to CITY-TV to do ‘Free For All.’ But he never stopped painting. He completed a large mural for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in l968, had museum exhibitions and gallery shows with David Mirvish, Quan, Dresdnere and the Morris Gallery. When John Morris suggested he apply for a Canada Council grant and asked what he would do if he got it, Ronald said off-handedly, “I’d paint the Prime Ministers or something.” He got the grant. The press got hold of it, and the 16 canvasses of the Prime Ministers of Canada became a reality. The exhibition was opened by Pierre Elliot Trudeau at the Art Gallery of Ontario in April l984 and toured to museums across the country.
The exhibitions are more sporadic now. He showed at Christopher Cutts last year and this spring was the subject of a Bravo CITY-TV exhibit of current paintings and a short film which showed him at work in his former studio in Toronto. Ronald now works out of the former Bell Telephone building in downtown Barrie. The three story red brick building is soon to be renamed the William Ronald Building. A 4,000 foot studio provides him with the right environment to work on his big canvasses.
The building is owned by Peter Meier whose interests lie in real estate, art and promoting the work of William Ronald. (He is organizing a new exhibition for Berlin within the next year.) Ronald paints on the good days and into the night. He says of his deteriorating health, “I’m 71. I don’t remember a day without pain. I’ve had two heart attacks, a quadruple bypass. I’ve got arthritis and my knees are gone. I still paint and I paint fast. I worry about going blind.”
But the outrageousness, the wildness, the outspokeness, the vitality and fun of William Ronald are still there. He has recently purchased a used Rolls Royce, metallic sand with dark green leather upholstery. His two comely female assistants drive him around because he hasn’t driven for 12 years. He rides in the back seat behind dark sunglasses enjoying his celebrity.
“You have to believe in yourself because it is a bitch. If I didn’t do New York I would be nothing here.” When asked how he sees himself, he replies “good... one of the best painters that ever lived in Canada.” How would he like to be remembered? “As a great fighter... great painter.”
Solo Exhibitions:
1957-1960 Kootz Gallery, NYC 1960 Laing Galleries, Toronto 1963 Issacs Galllery, Toronto 1962-1963 Kootz Gallery, NYC 1963 Princeton University Art Gallery, NJ 1965 David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto 1970 Dunkelman Gallery, Toronto 1971 Tom Thompson Memorial Gallery, Owen Sound 1975 Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa 1977-1980 Morris Gallery, Toronto 1983 Galerie Dresdnere, Toronto 1984 Art Gallery of Toronto 1985 Musée d’art de Joliette, PQ 1990 Musée d’art de Joliette, PQ 1996 Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto 1998 Waddington & Gorce, Montreal, PQ 2000 Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto
Collections:
Art Gallery of Toronto The National Gallery of Canada Museum of Modern Art, NYC Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA Musée d’Art Joliette, Quebec Solomon R. Guggenhiem Museum, NYC Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Art Institute of Chicago Montreal Museum of Fine Arts York University Princeton University Art Gallery Whitney Museum of Art, NYC Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queens University Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta Hirshorn Museum, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.