Eastern Group of Painters

The Eastern Group of Painters was a Canadian artists collective founded in 1938 in Montreal, Quebec. The group included Montreal artists whose common interest was painting and an art for art's sake aesthetic, not the espousal of a nationalist theory as was the case with the Group of Seven or the Canadian Group of Painters. The group’s members included Alexander Bercovitch, Goodridge Roberts, Eric Goldberg, Jack Weldon Humphrey, John Goodwin Lyman, and Jori Smith. Goldberg and Lyman were both well represented by Max Stern's Dominion Gallery in Montreal.

By the late 1930s, many Canadian artists began resenting the quasi-national institution the Group of Seven had become. As a result of a growing rejection of the view that the efforts of a group of artists based largely in Ontario constituted a national vision or oeuvre, many artists - notably those in Quebec - began feeling ignored and undermined. The Eastern Group of Painters formed to counter this notion and restore variation of purpose, method, and geography to Canadian art.

John Lyman's Contemporary Arts Society (1939–48) (in French, Société d'art contemporain) evolved out of the Eastern Group of Painters.

References

• The Canadian Encyclopedia - Artists' Organizations