{"id":50623,"date":"2022-11-15T11:44:29","date_gmt":"2022-11-15T16:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artoronto.ca\/?p=50623"},"modified":"2022-11-15T11:44:29","modified_gmt":"2022-11-15T16:44:29","slug":"harold-town-the-muscle-show-at-cutts-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/?p=50623","title":{"rendered":"Harold Town: The Muscle Show at Cutts Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Harold Town, Musclemen, 1984, oil and lucite on canvas, 55.5 x 68.5 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Town: The Muscle Show<\/em> at Christopher Cutts Gallery is a display of Harold Town flexing his own creative muscle in the closing decade of his life. I admit that I couldn\u2019t suppress a smile at his nerve at tackling full throttle a subject that was not \u201cin\u201d or popular in any refined, cultural sense. His building up to this painterly leap is revealed in a statement that he made in the late \u201870s, \u201cIt\u2019s time for me to become unpopular again.\u201d Predictably, the works were disparaged as trivial by the art establishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harold Town, Muscle Men #3, 1981, oil and lucite on canvas, 60 x 120 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Town stuck to his guns, insisting they should be included in his 1986 retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As painting subject, his musclemen paintings here have proven resilient, being also prescient. Bodybuilding itself at that time underwent a rehabilitation from the freakish to a somewhat respectable arm of the physical fitness movement that took off in the 1980s. The acknowledged catalyst seems to have been the 1977 bodybuilding documentary, Pumping Iron<\/em>, that introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger to popular culture. Shelley Town cites Pumping Iron<\/em> as an inspiration of her father for the Muscle paintings. The artist would subsequently go on to collect 1970s muscle magazines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harold Town, Muscle Man #1, 1981, oil on linen canvas, 90 x 60 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A liberation from the constraint of \u201ctaste\u201d fueled a sense of the heroic in Town\u2019s Muscle Man<\/em> series of paintings, that included an occasional “Muscle Woman.\u201d The artist\u2019s Muscle Man #1<\/em> stands out as a gesture of defiance, featuring a subject with flexed bicep and clenched fist raised high. Town dated the work April 1, 1981 as perhaps a sucker punch to his critics, as if to say, “Plenty of time for history to sort out where the joke lands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harold Town, The Muscle Show<\/em> exhibition view<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apart from the anomaly of bodybuilders as subject, Town\u2019s Muscle Men<\/em> paintings possess an exuberance independent of their images. Their allusion to the landscape is clear in their unshackled freedom with brush, colour and form. Similarly, to the artist\u2019s 1970s Snap<\/em> series of paintings, The Muscle Show <\/em>is a prime example of a Harold Town career shift on steroids, energized here by a supporting tactic, \u201cpumping irony.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve Rockwell<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Images are courtesy of Christopher Cutts Gallery<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Exhibition information: Harold Town, The Muscle Show, <\/em>October 15 \u2013 November 19, 2022, Christopher Cutts Gallery, 21 Morrow Ave, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tue \u2013 Sat, 10am \u2013 6pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Steve Rockwell<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Muscle Show<\/em> is a prime example of a Harold Town career shift on steroids, energized here by a supporting tactic, \u201cpumping irony.”<\/p>\n

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