Artist Info
Maxwell Bates
Maxwell Bates
Maxwell Bates is one of Canada’s premier Modernist artists. He produced an incredible amount of paintings over his career, addressing a wide variety of subjects, all while maintaining an architectural practice. Formative artistic experiences at the Chicago Art Institute in 1929 and in London England, where he lived during the 1930s, provided the foundation for his incredible body of work.
As an Expressionist, Bates was keenly interested in the human experience and how it could be explored and expressed through art. The Great Depression, internment as a prisoner of war during the Second World War and the death of his first wife, May Watson, all influenced his worldview, refining his artistic philosophy and clarifying his approach to art. From 1945 until 1962 Bates lived in Calgary where he worked as an architect while developing his mature style of painting and broadening his subject matter. This period cemented his reputation as one of Canada’s premier Expressionists painters. Bates was a tremendous arts advocate and during this time he tirelessly promoted Modernism in Alberta and Alberta art in Canada. In 1954 Bates began designing the crowning achievement of his architectural career, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Calgary, and he met and married his second wife, Charlotte Kintzle.
After returning from an extended trip through Europe, Bates suffered a massive stroke in November of 1961. Relocating to Victoria, BC, Bates recovered and eventually resumed painting full time, despite the permanent physical impediments caused by the stroke. Bates flourished in Victoria, creating some of his strongest and boldest work, and achieving his widest recognition and acclaim. While prolific and determined, his health eventually began to decline, and in the fall of 1978 he suffered another stroke that forced him to retire from painting. With Charlotte by his side, Bates spent the next year-and-a-half in hospital where he died in 1980. No other Canadian artist so relentlessly pursued the Expressionist possibilities of the figure nor the emotional resonance of paint.
(From Maxwell Bates: The In-Crowd Exhbition at the Glenbow, 2020)
